Curating Contemporary Music Festivals a New Perspective on Music's Mediation

From:

Brandon Farnsworth Curating Contemporary Music Festivals A New Perspective on Music's Mediation

August 2020, 326 p., pb., 8 B&W-ill., 6 col.-ill.

45,00 € (DE), 978-3-8376-5243-7 E-Book: available as free open access publication PDF: 0,00 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-5243-1

Contemporary music, like other arts, is dealing with the rise of »curators« laying claim to everything from festivals to playlists – but what are they and what do they do anyway? Drawing from backgrounds ranging from curatorial studies to festival studies and musicology, Brandon Farnsworth lays out a theory for understanding curatorial practices in contemporary music, and how they could be a solution to the field's diminishing social relevance. The volume focuses on two case studies, the Munich Biennale for New Music Theatre, and the Maerzmusik Festival at the Berliner Festspiele, putting them in a transdisciplinary history of curatorial practice, and showing what music curatorial practice can be.

Brandon Farnsworth, born in 1991, works as an independent music curator, and as a research associate at the Zurich University of the Arts, where he also studied classical music performance and transdisciplinary studies. He pursued his doctoral degree in historical musicology at the University of Music Carl Maria von Weber Dresden, and was an affiliated researcher with the joint »Epistemologies of Aesthetic Practice« doctoral program at the Collegium Helveticum. His research focuses on the intersection of performance and curatorial studies, and strives for a global perspective.

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Image and Figure Rights...... 9

1 Introduction ...... 11 1.1 Establishing the Field...... 11 1.2 The State of the Art...... 15 1.2.1 Scholarly Literature...... 15 1.2.2 Literature on Curating Performance ...... 20 1.3 Scope and Overview ...... 23

2 Curating ...... 29 2.1 Introduction...... 29 2.1.1 The Scopic Regime of the Crystal Palace...... 34 2.1.2 ModernistExhibitionPracticesandtheCommodificationoftheMusicalWork at World’s Fairs in England...... 36 2.1.3 The International Narrative of the Festival...... 38 2.2 The Anatomy of Festivals and Biennales...... 40 2.2.1 Fest/ival ...... 40 2.2.2 Arts Festivals...... 43 2.2.3 General Characteristics of Arts Festivals ...... 46 2.3 Curating Biennales...... 61 2.3.1 Documenta V...... 61 2.3.2 Documenta 11...... 72 2.4 Curatorial Discourse...... 80 2.4.1 Historical Emergence ...... 81 2.4.2 Curatorial Ambiguity ...... 84 2.4.3 Curating and Immaterial Work...... 88 2.5 Conclusion...... 94

3 Performative Curating and Experimental Performance ...... 97 3.1 Introduction...... 97 3.2 Reading Shannon Jackson...... 98 3.2.1 Theatricality as the Violation of Medium-Specificity...... 99 3.2.2 Jackson’s Ten Theses...... 105 3.3 Curating Dance / Dance Curating ...... 111 3.3.1 Dance is Hard to See...... 111 3.3.2 Dance and the Museum...... 116 3.4 Curating Theatre / Theatre Curating ...... 124 3.4.1 Dramaturgy vs. Curating ...... 124 3.4.2 Truth is Concrete...... 130 3.5 Conclusion...... 136

4 MunichBiennaleforNewMusicTheater ...... 139 4.1 Introduction...... 139 4.2 Hans Werner Henze ...... 141 4.2.1 Henze’s Compositional Practice ...... 141 4.2.2 Henze’s Biennales ...... 142 4.3 Music Theatre?...... 145 4.4 Peter Ruzicka...... 148 4.4.1 Ruzicka’s Career...... 148 4.4.2 Two Fragments ...... 149 4.4.3 Ruzicka’s Biennales...... 154 4.5 Daniel Ott and Manos Tsangaris (DOMTS)...... 162 4.5.1 Manos Tsangaris...... 163 4.5.2 Daniel Ott...... 165 4.5.3 Concave and Convex ...... 168 4.6 The 2016 and 2018 Biennale Editions ...... 169 4.6.1 Overview...... 169 4.6.2 Biennale Platforms...... 173 4.7 Compositional and Curatorial Practices...... 180 4.7.1 Musical Means, Curatorial Ethos...... 180 4.7.2 Education and Dissemination...... 185 4.7.3 The Biennale Platforms as a Change in Labour Relations ...... 194 4.7.4 Heterogenity as a Meta-Narrative...... 199 4.8 The Munich Biennale in Numbers...... 203 4.8.1 Age of Commissioned Composers at the Biennale...... 204 4.8.2 Number of Productions at the Biennale...... 206 4.8.3 Concentration of Productions at the Biennale...... 208 4.8.4 Gender of Commissioned Individuals at the Biennale...... 209 4.8.5 Number of Co-Producers of Biennale Productions...... 212 4.9 Conclusion...... 216 5 Maerzmusik: Festival für Zeitfragen ...... 219 5.1 Introduction...... 219 5.2 A Brief Prehistory to the Maerzmusik Festival...... 222 5.2.1 The Berliner Festspiele ...... 222 5.2.2 Musik-Biennale Berlin...... 224 5.2.3 Historical Trauma and the Post-Reunification Musik-Biennale Berlin ...... 226 5.3 Maerzmusik 2002–2014...... 228 5.4 Berno Odo Polzer ...... 230 5.4.1 The Programme is now the Text...... 230 5.4.2 Attaca...... 234 5.4.3 Experiments with Concert Staging ...... 238 5.4.4 The Catalogue as the Locus of Discourse-Production...... 242 5.5 2017 Opening Concert: Julius Eastman...... 247 5.5.1 The Northwestern University Concert, 16 January, 1980 ...... 247 5.5.2 A Concert, A Reenactment...... 253 5.6 Storytelling for Earthly Survival...... 258 5.6.1 Storytelling for Earthly Survival Part 3: Composting is so Hot! ...... 265 5.6.2 Compos(t)ing the Evening...... 266 5.7 Curating and the Maerzmusik Festival ...... 268 5.7.1 Curating Concerts...... 268 5.7.2 Maerzmusik’s Curatorial Shift...... 270 5.8 Decolonizing Time...... 273 5.9 Conclusion/Coda/Konzertemacher ...... 277

6 Conclusion/Curating Music...... 281

Bibliography...... 289

Appendix: List of Productions at the Munich Biennale for New Music Theatre from 1988–2018 ...... 311 1 Introduction

1.1 Establishing the Field

This book is an attempt to establish a theoretical basis for curatorial practice inthe field of contemporary classical music 1(CCM). As organizers and artists alike are experimenting with new forms of mediating and presenting musical work, CCM’s relation to its audiences is becoming a key area of concern both for scholars and for practitioners. There thus exists an urgency for reflecting on these approaches from a scholarly perspective informed by practice, one that can reflect on the interrelationships between forms of music’s administration, mediation, and performance. In order to do this, this work will lay out a new way of understanding the mediation of contemporary musical practice, one that is both informed by curatorial practices in neighbouring artistic disciplines, but also developed out of the unique and specific challenges that exist in relation to such practices inCCM. Central to this project will be the argument that music curatorial practice is not synonymous with interdisciplinary concert dramaturgy: composing concerts, inte- grating sound installations, performances that feature visual elements, or “expanding” the definition of musical material does not necessarily mean success in achieving social relevance, or creating new paradigms of musical production, rather, such initiatives often represent remixes or superficial changes to a robust underlying ideology. In contrast, music curatorial methodologies should be understood as symptomatic of a new and different kind of approach to musical leadership, one with an increased attention to the effect of mediation and contextualization on the perception of musical practice. A variety of relevant sources drawn from curatorial studies in both the visual arts, and in the performing arts of dance and theatre, will allow for connections to concepts and ideas about the mediation of art from a broader array of practitioners. In this way, curatorial practice in music is not the “importation” of something from

1 Throughout this work, the term the term “contemporary classical music” (abbreviated CCM) will be referred to when discussing the field in general, while the term “New Music” will be used when discussing specifically the German context, where the relationship to Neue Musik is an important historical reference. 12 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

a foreign discipline, but rather constitutes specific kind of approach to thinking about mediation, one that is informed by music history, but also takes advantage of an abundance of interesting practices and ideas also from other disciplines. These examples and arguments are used in order to enrich discussion of the mediation of CCM festivals, and to provide additional perspectives on how to interpret the formats being analyzed. Curatorial practices in music are thus argued to be ones that understand the setting of a specific frame for a musical event as itself an expressive and often critical act. In developing a framework for examining such practices, which this volume attempts in the first two chapters, the goal is to create more nuanced understandings of music curatorial practice that will in turn spur and inform future music curatorial initiatives. Although important developments are occurring in many different kinds of musical institutions, the focus of this work is specifically on the leadership of festivals, in particular focusing on two complementary case studies of curatorial practice in CCM. While it is not just festivals that are beginning to engage with these challenges—important developments are happening also in the programming of concert series and seasons, in the leadership of permanent cultural institutions, and in education—both their central role in the sustaining of European musical life, and their being the site of several significant attempts at addressing these issues make them an ideal starting point for investigating the mediation of musical practice. Even just focusing on Germany, a short survey of some of its best-known festivals reveals how many of them are currently undergoing fundamental changes that can be viewed through the lens of a curatorial perspective. For instance, its oldest festival for New Music, and one of few entirely for new commissions, the Donaueschinger Musiktage has over many editions now tried to reflect on how forms of musical presentation must be updated for a changing society.2 The Darm- stadt Summer Course, which despite ostensibly being a summer school is also a major “festival” in its own sense, has also been embracing change, creating so- called “open spaces” as of 2010 that give a platform for participants in the course to self-organize and show their work, and is expanding the (sub)genres of musical programming it offers. The Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, another important commissioning festival, has been attempting new approaches and concert formats, such as music theatre. The ECLAT festival in Stuttgart has also been embracing music theatre, performance installations, and concerts that address their multi-media dimensions. The Munich Biennale for New Music Theater, which will be studied here, has been creating idiosyncratic new forms of music theatre that are experimenting with the limits of the genre. The Maerzmusik festival, another

2 OnthefestivalinDonaueschingen,seeKöhler2006,87–93. 1 Introduction 13 case study, has been engaging in deep theoretical reflection about its role and the composers it programs. A view just over Germany’s borders reveals similarly large- scale and important festivals experimenting with their formats, such as Oslo’s Ul- tima festival, Vienna’s Wien Modern, the Festival Rümlingen near Basel, or Archipel in Geneva, to name just a few examples close at hand. While certainly worthwhile, a detailed study of all major German New Music festivals would be beyond the scope of the current volume. Instead, the focus will be on two case studies, the Munich Biennale for New Music Theater (Chapter 4), and the annual Maerzmusik Festival at the Berliner Festspiele (Chapter 5), each of which for its own unique reasons can be considered as exemplarily of certain changes and challenges that are currently occurring in this field. While both are also examined historically, the primary concern here is with some of their most recent editions: the 2016 and 2018 editions of the Munich Biennale, as well as the 2017 and 2018 editions of Maerzmusik. 3 These festivals are argued to exhibit important symptoms ofa new kind of leadership of music festivals, one that closely combines administrative and artistic considerations together into what will be argued to be a curatorial practice. A study of the more august Donaueschinger Musiktage and Darmstadt Sum- mer Course was decided against. This is because the two case studies that have been chosen here are argued to exhibit under their current leadership unique and exemplary forms of musical mediation not seem to the same extent at the two other festivals. This in turn makes them more significant case studies than their two better-known counterparts. Examining the Munich Biennale for New Music Theater in Chapter 4 allows for the opportunity to explore New Music’s relation to music theatre in depth. The focus in this chapter lies on an examination of the relationship between the artistic practices of both Daniel Ott and Manos Tsangaris, the current co-directors, and in particular the platforms that they have run in the lead up to their two biennales so far. Both composers’ focus on the composition of heterogeneous elements in their compositional practices, a trait that appears again in how they constitute the conditions of production for biennale compositions, establishes an integration of their artistic and administrative practices that is mirrored in their approach to the biennale. This is argued to relate to curatorial practice in its blending of organizational and creative aspects, and resembles the skillset required for the contemporary knowledge worker. By in turn encouraging young practitioners to take charge of the mediation of their works as an extension of their artistic practice, they mirror

3 ForboththeMunichBiennaleforNewMusicTheater,aswellastheMaerzmusikfestivalatthe Berliner Festspiele, the festivals were examined both historically since their founding, and throughfirst-personmethods(withtheauthorvisitingthefestivaleditionsthatarediscussed in-depth in this volume). 14 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

the transformation of their own artistic practices into curatorial ones. This creates a kind of nesting-doll situation that allows for an examination of both new edu- cational practices (and their challenges) in music theatre, as well as the manner in which their commissioned productions are mediated to the festival public. The book then complements the focus on music theatre by examining the Maerzmusik festival and its processes of commissioning that puts emphasis on the experience of the festival event itself as the objective of the curatorial practice of the festival curator, Berno Odo Polzer. The selection of individual works, and the specific ways in which they are programmed, presented, and combined in various formats are understood as a form of artistic expression by the director, achieved through the careful composition of festival concerts. These concerts weave CCM together with related artistic presentations into situated combinations that function through thematic or formal similarity. Developing out of this, Polzer’s music curatorial approach is focused on the specific “composition” and mise en scène of musical and other works inorderto investigate various concepts and ideas related to music, its history, and its relationship to issues of time and perception. As Polzer’s position as artistic director of this festival concentrates definitional power in one individual, the festival becomes a realization of his vision. This relationship between artistic director and the works he programs has been readily established in curatorial discourse. Using the history of exhibition-making as a guide, this approach is forecast to come into tension with musical practitioners taking charge of their own processes of mediation, as explored with the Munich Biennale.4 While this contradiction exists between emancipated values at the centre of the festival and the establishment of the curator at its authorial centre, the festival is nevertheless regarded as a successful instance of using musical means to create a festival that explicitly positions itself towards major societal debates such as decolonization, gender issues, ecological crises, capitalism and neoliberalism, etc. In examining these two case studies, it is argued that they are touching on and beginning to experiment with curatorial concepts, however that there still remains avenues of improvement when it comes to the realization of music curatorial

4 Throughoutthisvolume,theterm“musicalpractitioner”willbeusedtorefertoapersonwho is participating somehow in the act of music-making. This term is used because of its ambiguity as to the exact nature of the role being played, and allows for description of musical performance without assigning discrete, pre-codified roles at the same time. This is particularly relevant in those cases where established roles and responsibilities in the music-making process are being subverted, or new combinations of responsibilities are being formed. These new forms are then allowed to emerge through their description rather than through recourse to reified categories. Its ambiguity also allows for an openness to exist in regards to the disciplinary or genre affiliation of the music maker—allowing also this to be something defined in the situated event of performance. 1 Introduction 15 practices. Through the close examination of these two exemplary cases, as wellas through the laying of a theoretical groundwork for music-curatorial thinking, this volume begins to span the gap between artistic and administrative practices in CCM and those of the larger performing arts field.

1.2 TheStateoftheArt

1.2.1 Scholarly Literature

While several fields touch on issues also related to curating in music, a significant scholarly treatment of the subject has yet to be found. While some prominent scholarly projects relate to the intermixing of artistic and organizational considerations in musical practice, this project will be argued to differ from earlier research in significant ways. A first position in this area is Martin Tröndle, with his scholarly project toes- tablish a theory of the concert as a basis for the field of concert studies. This approach has been outlined by Tröndle across two edited compilations, Das Konzert (2011) and Das Konzert II (2018). He is clear throughout both his texts and the articles collected in his compilations that the object of his research is the concert for classical music in both its historical development, and as it exists today, a field that he claims has received very little academic treatment historically, which also supports the position maintained here (2018, 25). While his chief concern is the classical music concert, and thus slightly different to this project, it nevertheless takes a similar perspective on contemporary musical practice, examining the constitution of its frame. Tröndle argues that the classical concert as it exists today, with its separation of the participants in a concert event into a collective of silent, passive listeners and active musicians, is no longer relevant for a society where individuality is highly prized (Tröndle 2018, 42). In other words, the classical concert format is no longer adapted to the contemporary public, and must evolve to suit their interests. As a remedy to this problem, Tröndle suggests a broad program of experimentation with the various elements of the concert situation, all with the goal of finding various new ways of presentation that will catch the attention of a contemporary public.5

5 As Patrick Hahn suggests, the metric of success that Tröndle uses in this part of his argu- mentquicklyrevealsitselftobethemarket.HisessayalsosupportsthecriticismthatTröndle defines his project extremely narrowly in terms of the traditional classical concert as it has persisted over time (see Hahn 2018, 18–19). 16 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

Tröndle’s approach to defining the basis for a domain of concert studies isprob- lematic in its framing of the field of concert studies using a structuralist methodology: distinct musical communities are understood as homogenous and self-same, and the relationships between them (i.e. what makes for a successful concert experience in pop music, or techno, or hip-hop, etc.) is established through an equiv- alency of relations (a is to b as c is to d). Therefore, neither the form of audience subjectivity constituted through characteristics of the concert event, nor the content being programmed are permitted to be called into question outside of a rel- ativist understanding of community values. The diagnosed irrelevancy of the classical concert then places an impossible burden on solely the issue of concert setup and staging to solve, while unquestioningly upholding core aspects of Werktreue and the classical canon as seemingly faultless and beyond criticism. Added to the methodological problems with this approach, Tröndle’s project is, because of his underextension of the classical concert, dealing with the established canonical classical music repertoire and the implications for it of new and different kinds of stagings. The material is pre-assumed, and seemingly cannot be called into question, rather, only its “framing” is in need of further reflection for him, in a schema that thus implies that these can be freely separated from each other. This volume seeks to establish a more dynamic relationships between artistic practices, their mediation, and their reception. The focus is on understanding the situated assemblages of contemporary music festivals, rather than on application of presumed values. It is furthermore focused more on the dissolution of homogenous, container-based conceptions of cultural production (not a chief concern for Tröndle). For these reasons, the work of Tröndle does not establish a significant forerunner to the following project. Jonas Becker’s Konzertdramaturgie und Marketing: Zur Analyse der Programmgestal- tung von Symphonieorchestern (Concert dramaturgy and marketing: an analysis of the program design of symphony orchestras) is subject to similar criticisms. Leav- ing aside that the work deals mainly with three symphony orchestras in Duisburg, Essen, and Bochum, rather than with festivals, the work would conceivably be relevant to this volume through its titular examination of the relationships between concert design and marketing. This connection is a fundamentally curatorial consideration, in its focus on the ways in which managerial and economic concerns can be reconciled with artistic ones (see section 2.4.2). Furthermore, the term curating is often implicitly understood as somehow synonymous with a form of program design by many who use it in writing about CCM, as will be shown in the next section. Becker’s conclusion seems to sketch the outlines of some important curatorial problems that would need to be solved in order to better realize non-normative concert dramaturgies, audience outreach, and more diverse programming at the three institutions analyzed. However his project is clearly one of description and not of 1 Introduction 17 engagement or theoretical action. He states that due to certain resistances among programmers, musicians, and the audience, only modest amounts of change are possible (2015, 199–202). A balance is called for between “convention and innovation,” forming a synthesis that is already heavily weighted towards stasis, and is not further expanded upon (202). Unwillingness to thoroughly explore the constitution of the categories he describes means that he does not succeed in developing any useful theoretical tools for transforming the status quo. For instance, the du- alism between “music-internal” and “music-external” (inner- and aussermusikalische Themen) is steadfastly maintained throughout, along with once again the untouch- ability and immutability of the concept of the musical work, preventing more fundamental analysis of the issues that are diagnosed to be pursued. In contrast to the previous two positions, Christa Brüstle’s Konzert-Szenen (2013) has been a useful reference, in that the work follows musical practices over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries that understand the moment of their performance as not a moment of reproduction, but as an event happening in the moment. Through this shift, she is able to write an history of alternative concerts, onesthat acknowledges that all senses of perception make up the concert experience, not just the ear, and that so-called “musical autonomy” should perhaps not always be the sole focus of the concert (Brüstle 2013, 9–10). She furthermore astutely points out that the separation into aspects “internal” and “external” to music, crucial to both positions above, may be better understood as “external to musicology” instead (ibid.). The scope of Brüstle’s work does not however include approaches to festival leadership; her concern is with artistic practices. Her work is nonetheless significant in its portrayal of artists who see the mediation of their works as integral to their musical expression. Thus, while not explicitly positioning itself in regards to issues of arts administration, as with Tröndle or Beckert, Brüstle ends up de- riving an approach to concert mediation out of artistic experiments with it. The trajectory of her work provides an important account of the historical factors in contemporary musical practice that have led to many of the mediational strategies employed by musicians discussed here. Because as a matter of course it does not focus on institutional questions, or questions of the festival event, the work is then nevertheless not a significant forerunner to this volume. While no major scholarly projects may currently exist in this regard, there have been attempts particularly within the realm of journals and publications about CCM that have begun to explore the implications of curating in the field of music. A recent notable example was the May 2018 issue of Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, focusing on the theme of curating and its potential meaning in New Music practice. Among the articles was an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist (by the director of Wien Modern, Bernhard Günther), underscoring the importance of that star curator as the symbol of curatorial practice par excellence in New Music’s imag- 18 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

ination of curatorial practice (Obrist and Günther 2018). This was complemented by an article by Jörn-Peter Hiekel contextualizing the field’s interest in curating with music historical examples of earlier attempts at rethinking the concert format (Hiekel 2018a). This author also published an essay, situating the interest in curating by other fields within a history of curating’s emergence as an independent field (Farnsworth 2018). Also of note is a significant article in the New Music publication MusikTexte that asked a series of questions about festival leadership to the leaders of major European festivals themselves (Eclat, Wien Modern, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, etc.). The article is noteworthy in its premise that festival directors themselves can and should be a source of discourse about their festivals themselves (Nonnenmann 2017). Perhaps the most ambitious project so far has been the initiative Defragmenta- tion: Curating Contemporary Music, a cooperation between the Darmstadt Sum- mer Course, the Maerzmusik Festival in Berlin, and the Donaueschinger Musik- tage, in cooperation with the former director of the Ultima Festival in Oslo. The initiative describes itself as a

research project aimed at enduringly establishing the debates currently ongo- ing in many disciplines on gender & diversity, decolonization and technological change in institutions of New Music, as well as discussing curatorial practices in this field. (Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, n.d.)

The project consisted of internal meetings between festival directors andexpert advisors in the fields they wished to address, as well as a final conference atthe Darmstadt Summer Course in 2018. Whether the initiative will have any long-lasting effects remains to be seen, but so far has seemed to only act as a fig-leaf, addressing these issues superficially rather than show any fundamental willingness for change in either programming or festival infrastructure. In their response to the Defragmentation conference in Darmstadt, the curatorial collective Gender Relations in New Music characterized the initiative as such:

The “Defragmentation” initiative—responding to our initial call to action [at the 2016 Darmstadt Summer Course]—is a long overdue opening into institutional acknowledgement of these issues; an important and laudable start. That being said, “Defragmentation” has yet to make any specific public commitments to seri- ousstructuralchange.Instead,theprimaryoutcomeoftheoverallinitiativeseems to be this week’s “convention”—an outcome that threatens to do little more than pay lip service to and tokenize the issues without tackling them head on. (Gender Relations in New Music n.d.-a)6

6 Notethattheauthorwasinvolvedinthedraftingofthisstatement. 1 Introduction 19

These issues remain unaddressed by the organizers. In other words, it seemsas if, though there is gradually an acknowledgement of the importance of curating CCM—understood here as a cypher for critical knowledge production, an interest in issues of social justice, and a willingness on the part of organizers to reflect on how they are framing musical practices in their festivals—there still remains a lack of serious commitment to these issues on the part of festival leaders. A further aspect that can be studied is how CCM practitioners use the words “curating” and “curator.” Examining the occurrences of these terms and the contexts in which they are used allows for an insight into how curatorial practices have been perceived implicitly by music practitioners. In order to do this, an opportunity sample (n = 16 individual selected sources) of instances where the term has been used specifically by prominent figures in New Music and concert studies in recent years has been made, and its discursive context analyzed.7 These consisted mainly of texts by musicologists, introductions to festivals and projects, essays in specialized magazines, and one interview. While this sample is small and statistically non-representative, it allows for a small survey of the use of the term across important figures in the German New Music community. The result shows botha range of meanings, and a general consensus about specifically two key characteristics of the term’s definition as it is currently being used. The first finding is that the use of the term curating often seems tobeused as a rhetorical marker to flag that the approach to organizing is based on some kind of theme, and therefore rather than operating within one single artistic tradition, is willing to engage with any related artistic discipline. It is also commonly associated with references to the visual and performing arts in this respect, and to practices that engage or navigate through multiple fields. An observed emphasis on experiments with concert staging, creating alternatives to established forms, relationships between various forms of knowledge, and by extension often also political considerations, means that curating is connotated with a renewed emphasis on the relationship between contemporary music and society, and a break in some form with the status quo.

7 The following sources are significant instances of discussing New Music in regards to curating, curators, something being curated, or “curated by” (NB many sources are in Ger- man, where “Kurator, Kuratieren, kuratiert, kuratiert von” were searched for): Walker 2018, 405, 406, 409; Tröndle 2018, 11, 13; Wimmer 2018, 197; Lescène and Kreuser 2018, 28; Eck- hardt 2018, 27; Roesner 2016, 10; Freydank et al. 2016, 95, 99; Freydank et al. 2018, 153, 156, 160, 161, 237; Gottstein, Skoruppa, and Neupert 2017, 8, 132; Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde Donaueschingen e.V. 2018, 73; Berliner Festspiele n.d.–b; Daniel Ott in discussion with the author, 28 October 2017; Knipper 2018, 1; Hiekel 2018a, 22–23; Zimmermann 2018, 32; Oster- woldn.d.NBthisauthor’spublishedstatementsoncuratinghavebeendeliberatelyomitted, but see here again Farnsworth 2018. 20 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

A second finding is that an implicit understanding of the curator asaperson who experiments with the design of the concert setting and format, similar to the concept of concert dramaturgy, emergences frequently. Interesting about this aspect of the understanding of curating in music is that it is related to a very specific profile of the curator in the visual arts, whereby a star curator turns the organization of the exhibition and its mediation into a quasi-artistic practice and as a form of authorship. This in turn is connected to a less frequent connotation regarding curating standing for a subjective form of administrative control over a concert, festival, or venue. This is an acknowledgement of the potential for curatorial practice to turn into a new form of hierarchical control, where only the artistic vision at the top of the pyramid is permitted to realize their, as one put it, “megalomaniacal” vision (Gottstein, Skoruppa, and Neupert 2017, 132).

1.2.2 Literature on Curating Performance

The previous section having been necessary because of the lack of substantive scholarly reflections on the concept of curating in musical practice, in the neighbouring areas of dance, theatre, and performance, significant reflection on the role of the performance curator has existed for several years from multiple practitioners, and can help shed further light on the current understanding of curatorial practice in the performing arts. Notable publications in this field include the body of work about theatre and performance curating that Joanna Warsza and Florian Malzacher have been writing, editing, and publishing over the past several years. These include the four- part “Performing Urgency” series with Alexander Verlag (Malzacher 2015; Campen- hout and Mestre 2016; Burzynska 2016; Malzacher and Warsza 2017), Malzacher’s documentation of his Truth is Concrete project (see Malzacher 2014b), and Warsza’s catalogue for Public Art Munich 2018 (Warsza and Reed 2019). These compilations feature a mix of scholarly reflection on issues surrounding performance curating and often shorter, sometimes more personal texts focused more on describing performances themselves. Another major recent publication in this area is the recent anthology Curating Live Arts (Davida, Pronovost, Hudon, and Gabriels 2018), which takes an approach more from the direction of the interdisciplinary performing arts, which it refers to as “live arts,” as seen in the title.8

8 Seealsointhatvolumealistofnetworks,conferences,andinitiativesrelatedtotheseissues in the “live arts” in both Europe and North America (Davida, Pronovost, Hudon, and Gabriels 2018, 2n3). See as well the list of recent education programs in this field in the same volume (ibid., 2). 1 Introduction 21

Tom Sellar, at the Yale School of Drama, and editor of the journal Theater, has also dedicated two special issues of that publication to this problematic.9 Sellar’s understanding of theatre curating largely corresponds with the received definitions of the music practitioners surveyed above, however presented explicitly instead of as subtext, and within the context of academic papers and interviews, in particular his text “The Curatorial Turn,” written in 2014, which would articulate several important aspects of this then-emerging field. Curators are for Sellar the nego- tiator of various genre categories in an artistic moment when practitioners are blending various influences and practices. They are able to contextualize for anau- dience these works, and helping give them access thanks to their knowledge of the history of various pertinent discourses of art history, drama, etc. (2014, 22). This corresponds with the uses seen above associating the word curating in music with transdisciplinary artistic practice. In defining the so-called curatorial turn in the performing arts, Sellar identifies historical precedents for the practice, discussing in particular how the interdisciplinary mixings and political practices of the 1960s and 1970s would lead to a wave of engaged and experimental programmers in the next generation of the 1980s and 1990s (2014, 22). While Sellar names important institutions in the North American context, such as the Wexner Center in Ohio, the Walker Center in Minnesota, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, there exist many at least somewhat analogous institutions in Europe as well, such as the German network of free theatres (Freies Theater).10 His diagnosis corresponds with similar progressive practices in New Music festivals that would occur in roughly the same time period. As will be shown in Chap- ter 4, composer Hans Werner Henze’s founding of the Munich Biennale in 1988 in an attempt to encourage young composers to create experimental new music theatre works, along with the well-documented effect of the 1968 student protests on his thinking, also fits this description well (see section 4.2.2). The Donaueschinger Musiktage’s integration of sound art and installations into its festival as of 1993 can also be understood as early evidence of embracing multimedial and perhaps interdisciplinary approaches to music-making (Köhler 2006). Even Matthias Os- terwold’s Maerzmusik festivals, examined briefly in Chapter 5, could be described in Sellar’s words as a “multiplicity of intersected forms,” and resonate to an extent with this diagnosis (Sellar 2014, 22). In his attempt to describe the titular “curatorial turn” of the article, Sellar however distances such associations from his definition of a more recent form of performance curator, saying that a “newer group of independent performance curators … has emerged in the past decade alongside a tidal wave of site-based, urbanist,

9 Vol.44no.2(2014)togetherwithBertieFerdman,aswellasvol.47no.1(2017). 10 SeeBrauneckandITIGermany2017. 22 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

participatory, and relational performances” (Sellar 2014, 23). This new role is likened to the independent curators of the art world, and conceptually aligned both with the importance Sellar puts on contexualization, as well as with the auteur position of this form of curating in the visual arts (in other words ignoring the curatorial as a methodological approach). This in turn fits with the understanding of the curator in music as being associated with the subjective artistic control over the entirety of a festival or institution seen in the previous section. Furthermore, and once again corresponding to the implicit understanding of curating above, “skepticism of conventional structures” for presenting theatre has led theatre curators to experiment with various formats for presentation (Sellar 2014, 28). This happens both on the level of individual productions, which nolonger necessarily need to conform to the standard requirements of a production, as well as on the level of the festival or institution itself (28–29). Related to this is an association between curating and institutional critique in the theatre. As Sellar writes:

But in the fiscally fragile, intensely collaborative, and interreliant community of theater makers, public criticism and even internal criticism of program choices remains rare. So, could the performance curator introduce a critical orientation and influence to artistic planning? That trait alone would seem to distinguish them from producers, who generally regard criticism as a press and marketing tool rather than a guiding element for their own work. (Sellar 2014, 27)

This facet of the concept begins to connect with another of its observed usesin music, namely that it is being used as a way of signaling one’s breaking with convention and taking a more critical attitude towards the structures of musical institutions. While this may be more widespread in theatre, in the contemporary music community, there remains a lack of institutionally-critical practices.11

11 Historical practices associated e.g. with Fluxus, like Mauricio Kagel (see e.g. his film Ludwig van, 1970), as well as more recent practices like those of Johannes Kreidler (e.g. Product Place- ments, 2008) or Trond Reinholdtsen (the Ø series, 2015–) are notable exceptions, however the marginality of these few examples suggests they are the exceptions that prove the rule. Furthermore,whilee.g.BillDietzpointsoutthedistanceofmusicalpracticefromtheinstitu- tional critique movement in the visual arts (2017, 9), Matthias Rebstock argues that this can be attributed to experimental music theatre practices have also been historically distanced fromradicallyinstitutionalcriticalpracticesseenforinstanceinthefieldoftheatre.Hewrites that“[m]ostworksofneworexperimentalmusictheatreinthe1970swereperformedwithin structures that New Music had built, especially in the milieu surrounding radio broadcast- ing institutions. Initially, not many structures evolved parallel to the opera houses. [24] The foundation of free opera ensembles did not set in until the 1980s, gaining a further impetus in 1990s Vienna and Berlin.[25] As opposed to Freies Theater, the formation of a Freies Musiktheater was hence less political and less societally or socioculturally motivated” (2017, 532). It could thus conceivably be argued that the lack of analogous independent politically- 1 Introduction 23

Related to this is an understanding of the term curator put forward by another prominent theatre scholar on the issue, Florian Malzacher. For him, the term is understood as a “self-provocation” (Malzacher 2017, 17). He explains that calling his practice curating is not just exchanging one term for another, but rather de- manding a different approach from oneself, a way of questioning one’s mediating practice through a change of title, effectively reflecting this aspect of curating discussed above. Significantly, these definitions of the performance curator from the fieldof theatre seem to closely forecast the understandings of curating music implicitly used by musical practitioners surveyed in section 1.2.1. This not only shows the proximity between experimental theatre and the experimental musical practices of New Music (which can also include Music Theatre), but also the need for scholarship uniquely focused on musical practice itself, in order to identify possible divergences from or extensions to the definitions put forward by Sellar and Malzacher.

1.3 ScopeandOverview

The first concern of this volume is to develop a theoretical basis upon which astudy of festivals for contemporary music can be undertaken. The intention is that this basis be beneficial for the further analysis of both these and other festivals, serving as a new theoretical framework in which to understand them. As will be explored, there exists a gap in the scholarly literature around the conceptual, artistic, and music-historical ramifications of current experimentation with the mediation of CCM festivals. In the interest of spanning this gap, this book will also engage with a significant body of work that is already critically examining the structures of the festival format, namely the field of curatorial studies. Using this field as a starting pointfor analysis will make it possible to follow the histories of both music festivals and arts festivals back to a common ancestor, the universal expositions, revealing the set of basic theoretical assumptions that underpin both of these types of events. This approach allows for a transfer of concepts from the curating of large-scale arts events to those of contemporary music, in turn setting the basis for a rapprochement between various festival formats that are not often considered together. This is furthermore significant in that it is approaching festivals for contemporary musicin

engagedvenuesformusictheatreworksakintothoseoftheatreorthevisualartsaccountsat least partially for the discrepancy between New Music and other performing arts as to their engagementwithpoliticaltopics.Thisisbecausetheseotherdisciplineswoulddevelopmore radical forms in independent venues, which would then make their way into larger, more established institutions through processes of canonization and the hegemonic appropriation ofartisticcritiqueasoftheturnofthecentury(seealsoBoltanksiandChiapello[1999]2005). 24 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

such a way as to both address this knowledge-gap in the musicological literature, while also establishing theoretical bridges to other academic disciplines. Curatorial studies had until not too long ago focused mainly on festivals of the visual arts and perennial exhibitions. As will be shown in Chapter 3, it has however recently also become connected to performing arts festivals as well. This is the result of a shift in the self-understanding of curatorial practice (itself together with transformations in the art world), which is no longer exclusively related to the field of visual arts, but rather understood as a more general approach to mediation and creating frameworks for knowledge-production. Curating understood as the result of a carefully-composed event is a theoretical approach that aligns the field with theories of performance and the performative turn, and thus with the historic object of the performing arts. The many similar issues that music shares with other performing arts mean that an examination of curatorial studies in this field is particularly useful in developing an approach to curating festivals for contemporary music. A result of this discipline-agnostic understanding of curating is that the concept can be applied to a wide range of issues. While this leads to a danger of over- burdening the term, it can also be used as a methodology for establishing a form of critical mediation across a variety of media and contexts. This is in turn an approach that is also recursively applied to the writing of this volume itself. For instance, the work begins with a long literature review establishing a definition of curating. While this is important in framing later arguments, it has also been specifically written as a primer on some of the key debates surrounding curatorial practice historically for a specifically musical audience. This means that it takes into consideration the particular concerns relevant to New Music, while also attempting to address these implicitly through a particular linguistic and conceptual framing in order to make it more easily palatable for that particular group. The goal is to present material for further argumentation, but also to lay out a broader framework for further research—such as the many interrelationships between festivals for the arts and their modes of presentation. This extends to other areas of this volume as well. While musicology struggles with a lack of adequate tools for approaching transdisciplinary musical works, Chapter 3 provides an adaptable framework in the form of a series of concerns, issues, and common contradictions that can be adapted to help understand new registers of musical diversity. Care has also been taken that the two case studies that are presented here com- plement each other in order to provide as broad an examination of issues related to curatorial practice and its relationship to New Music as possible. The Munich Biennale shows the potentiality that musical practices can have when unmoored from their relationship to the external reference of a singular tradition, and how experimentation with the process of creating a festival can take place. The Maerz- 1 Introduction 25 musik festival for its part seeks to establish a new relationship to society and to its structures of knowledge-creation—mediated through the festival programming, itself understood by the curator as a quasi-compositional practice. Together, they show two different ways that curatorial practice in music can be realized in practice, with one festival focusing processes of commissioning, and another focusing on the presentation of works. While these two examples among many are in no way meant to represent a comprehensive panorama, it is hoped that they lay the foundation for further reflection on these and other music curatorial practices in the future. As has been already mentioned, the other aspect of this framework begins to be laid out starting in Chapter 2 with the establishment of a common historical basis for establishing a theory of festivals for contemporary music and visual arts via the case of the Crystal Palace Exhibition and subsequent universal expositions. Subsequent art and music festivals that would spread around the world in the years after the initial success of the format are argued to be linked together through a common basic dispositive of the festival as a mode of subjectification, ultimately connected to a modernist ideology of display. Having established this commonality, the rest of the chapter focuses on key moments in the discourse around the leadership for visual arts festivals. The focus of much of this discourse is on the relationship between conditions of display and the status of the work, as well as how these issues relate to the professional profiles of arts practitioners (artists, curators, etc.). A main concern of this discourse at the latest since the 1980s has been on problematizing the figure of the curator, which has in turn led to curatorial practice becoming a main subject of reflection and debate in the visual arts since that time. As curating became more formalized and academicized starting around the 1990s, it began to produce a rapidly-growing number of reflective texts on its origins, histories, practices, and ideologies of these figures and their practices. One outcome of this proximity to the academy has been the emergence of more philosophical approaches to curating, which understand it as a practice of critical mediation, one that helps set the frame and catalyze events of knowledge-production for others. Arguing with theorist Irit Rogoff, this is the facet of the practice that also gives it a critical potential in light of cognitive capitalism’s appropriation of knowledge-production. In general, it is this understanding (not definition) of curating that this book takes as a point of departure for understanding what curatorial practice in the field of music could entail. With Chapter 3, this approach to curating is connected to an understanding of the receiver-centric approach to the art-encounter, argued through a re-reading of the critique of minimalism by performance studies theorist Shannon Jackson. The constitution of the event of critical knowledge creation from the previous chapter is thus interfaced with a complexification of how the modalities of various media 26 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

and disciplinary traditions contribute to it. In order to better understand how the specificities of a performing arts tradition inflect this critical charter, curatorial practices in dance and theatre are also examined. In dance, the complexities of its relationship with both the museum and curatorial practice are examined, looking at the unique positioning of modern dance practices, as well as the issues and possibilities that contemporary dance practice has produced for dancers and audiences alike. In theatre, the curatorial practice and understanding of theatre curator Florian Malzacher is examined through an investigation of his project Truth is Concrete at Steirischer Herbst Graz in 2012. This is in order to study how curatorial practices in theatre interpret their relationship to critical knowledge production. This section is also an opportunity to make a historical and semantic differentiation between the curator and the dramaturg, who is frequently cited in debates around the mediation of performance as a figure with a similar profile. The dramaturg isfound to indeed share many similar features to the curator, however it is concluded that both the curator’s historical hypervisibility, as well as the large critical discourse that contributes to it, mean that the latter term is gradually supplanting the former. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the Munich Biennale for New Music Theater, and the Maerzmusik Festival at the Berliner Festspiele respectively, the two case studies at the centre of this volume. In both cases, the approach is to first give an account of the history of the festival since its inception and across its various artistic directors. Cumulatively, these histories build important strata that co-determine current festival editions. They also both offer perspectives on how these festivals have changed over the full course of their development, in consideration also of relevant literature, something that has until now not been rigorously attempted in regards to either of these two festivals. In examining the Munich Biennale in Chapter 4, this historical examination is followed by an examination of the relationship between the artistic practices of both Daniel Ott and Manos Tsangaris, the current co-directors, and the forms of administrative experimentation they are undertaking at the biennale. Both composers’ focus on the composition of heterogeneous elements in their artistic practices appears again in how they constitute the conditions of production for biennale compositions, effectively establishing a link between their artistic and administrative practices via an expanded notion of composition implying a taking into consideration of many diverse (f)actors that constitute the performative event while creating their work. This relates to curatorial practice in its blending of organizational and creative practices, and resembles the skillset required for the contemporary knowledge worker, with whom the figure of the curator shares many similarities. Several productions by the biennale will also be analyzed, in order to highlight certain other, also artistic, facets of their leadership. The basis of these analyses 1 Introduction 27 was, in addition to research, also the author’s own experience visiting biennale productions. This first-hand experience informs the analysis of the biennale. It also helpsto expose areas where the newly-conceived festival can improve its offering, such as in the need to ameliorate its strategies for mediating productions to their audiences. Despite these criticisms, developing an approach to commissioning music theatre works that produces relevant productions for contemporary society and audiences is a significant achievement in the field, and merits further study. They aredoing this by encouraging young practitioners to take charge of the mediation of their works as an extension of their artistic practice, mirroring also the transformation of their own artistic practices into a curatorial one. Chapter 5 compliments this focus on processes of commissioning with an emphasis on the experience of the festival event itself as the objective of the curatorial practice of the festival curator, Berno Odo Polzer. Here once again, the chapter begins with a historical examination of the festival and its origins as the Musik- Biennale Berlin—a festival for New Music in the GDR, and its subsequent integration after November 1989 into the Berliner Festspiele, where it now still resides. The festival’s focus on presenting individual concerts “composed” by the festival director have led to an analysis of the festival argued through individual works and the specific ways in which they were programmed and presented. Developing out of this, it will be shown that Polzer’s music curatorial approach is focused on the specific “composition” and mise en scène of musical and other works inor- der to investigate various concepts and ideas related to music, its history, and its relationship to time and perception. Polzer’s position as artistic director of this festival concentrates a great deal of definitional power in one individual; the festival becomes a realization ofhis vision. In another example of the usefulness and adequacy of curatorial discourse, it will be argued that this relationship between artistic director and the works he programs has been readily established in curatorial discourse, and that the position he takes is as necessary in the current context as it is bound on a collision course with musical practitioners taking charge of their own processes of mediation, as explored with the Munich Biennale. While this contradiction exists between emancipated values at the centre of the festival and the establishment of the curator at its authorial centre, the festival is nevertheless regarded as a successful instance of using musical means to create a festival that explicitly positions itself towards major societal debates such as decolonization, gender issues, ecological crises, capitalism and neoliberalism, etc. Between these two case studies, as well as the effort invested in laying a groundwork for music-curatorial thinking, the key output of this book is the connections that it establishes between emerging new forms of experimentation with the mediation of CCM and both curatorial discourses and a newfound critical project. It 28 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

attempts to span the gap between New Music practice (including administrative practice) and other forms of contemporary musical and artistic practice through an exploration of the concept of curating. 2 Curating

2.1 Introduction

Music festivals and contemporary art biennales are both based on the common concept of the festival.1 More specifically, they share a common link in thearts and culture festivals that have arisen in various forms over the course of the past 150–200 years, since their advent in the modern era, and the related social transformations of the industrial revolution and European colonialism. For this reason, the first case discussed in this volume will not be an arts festival at all, butrather the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (also known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition), which took place in London’s Hyde Park in 1851. This first universal exposition would prove to be a crystallization of much ofthe ideologies that would come to lie behind music festivals and arts biennales for the subsequent 150 years. Their historical similarities and divergences in the interim years can in this way be better brought into focus through an exploration of the value systems and ideologies imbued in this historical exhibition’s infrastructure. The common ancestor allows for a contrasting between the development ofthe two different traditions in the interim, in turn a way of investigating differences between music festivals and visual arts biennales. An integral part of visual arts biennales has, at least since the middle of the 20th century, become also a form of experimentation with the organization of the display itself as a practice and integral part of its operation. The complex networks that come together to make up the biennale have often been explicitly thematized within biennales themselves, by artists and artworks, but also by the emerging class of curators who design the structures of their festivals in such a way as to take a position within the knot of power relations that define the parameters of the festival.

1 The Italian spelling will be used (rather than the English “biennial”) in discussing arts biennales. This is in order to mark the relationship that these events have with the Venice Bien- nale, or as art historian Caroline A. Jones says, to mark their formation “against the backdrop of the ur-biennale, la Biennale di Venezia” (2012, 69). Note though that original spellings have been preserved in proper names and self-identifications of biennales (e.g. “Manifesta: Euro- pean Biennial of Contemporary Art”). 30 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

Music and theatre festivals for their part have less of this critical tradition, though these have also operated as similar, if not more powerful, spaces for negotiating power relations and artistic reputations. This evolutionary difference between the two types of festival in relation to the common ancestor is used to bring clearly into focus the many kinds of relationship between ideology and the staging of arts festivals. They serve as sites of modernist ritual, meant to inculcate certain setsof values, be they nationalistic, aesthetic, or critical, in the festival public. After having examined the Crystal Palace Exhibition and its implications, Doc- umenta will be analyzed as an example of how this tradition, initiated in those earlier universal expositions, continued in smaller festivals specializing only in the arts in the post-war period. Throughout its history, it has illustrated both thepro- cess of instrumentalization of the festival, but also the growth of the practice of curating which would ultimately take charge of it. With Szeemann’s Documenta 5, the emergence of the independent curator is examined. Remarkable about the figure of the independent curator is how they see the constitution of theexhi- bition as a form of artistic practice itself, experimenting with its parameters in order to present their own subjective message. The independent curator is thus presented as a post-modernist shift towards subjective rather than universal narratives. Szeemann also called into question the relationship between curator and artist, in particular as artists were also increasingly working with context as well, with the emergence of conceptual and installation art. What Documenta 5 ultimately shows is the beginning of curatorial practice’s self-reflexive approach to the contextualization of artistic work, and an early example of the exhibition as dis- puted territory between curator and artist. Examining Documenta 11 shows how this approach to experimentation with the format of the large-scale arts festival can be used to explicitly address the problematic forms of knowledge-production of the modern arts festival. Documenta 11 is an attempt at reframing the narrative of artistic development away from its priv- ileged place in the West, asking the audience to consider the wide range of artistic production happening across the globe as entangled with one-another, taking on a post-colonial perspective. It did this not through completely rejecting artistic production of the West, but rather attempting to reframe it within a new, global narrative. The curatorial approach to Documenta 11 pre-empts much of the critical project that defines curating also today: it becomes about working out a particular infrastructure design that allowed for knowledge to be produced in the event of experiencing art that was not a reproduction of a Western-centric ideology. As curators explored the conditions of display, the question regarding the nature of the distinction between the role of curator and the role of artist can be addressed. While both artist and curator have become engaged in experimentation with exhibition display and contextualization, the professional profile of the curator is found to be distinct in its need to exist as a balancing act between so many 2 Curating 31 different stakeholders, be they donors, local or international politics, the working relationships with artists, relevancy to current artistic debates, stylistic innova- tions, etc., that constitute the event of the festival or exhibition project. Mediating between these different interests while at the same time maintaining an ethical “curatorial responsibility” dedicated to nevertheless staking a relevant and critical position in regards to societal debates is what defines the embattled figure ofthe curator. This positions the curator as always in-between so many fields. Theyarea prophet of new ideas, but also a priest charged with preserving the old. They syn- thesize creative and managerial strategies in their practice, but must remain critical. Their talking and debate is perhaps pre-instrumentalized by cognitive capitalism’s thirst for ideas, but earnest reflection can take place when also considering this aspect in discussion. Balancing between these stakeholders means working actively in the field of management and institutional leadership itself. Ambigu- ously existing between instrumentalization and critique, the curatorial position is engaged with creating the context, creating situations that resist the possibility of confinement. Rather than allowing previously-problematic concepts to inflate through their integration of their criticism, it becomes about finding place for new beginnings, new stories, ones that better connect with the current transformations of contemporary global reality. The reason for examining the emergence of curating in the visual arts hasbeen to outline a definition of the practice as a kind of critical mediation that isagnos- tic in regards to the areas of knowledge that concern it. It is portrayed as a way of considering how mediators can navigate their complex surroundings while maintaining an interest in supporting the creation of artistic experiences that call into question the society in which they exist. Beginning with universal expositions is a way of looking at how the event of art’s reception by an audience has since the beginning of the modernist period and the industrial revolution been informed by a mode of display that disseminates the ideology of power to its subjects. Looking at the post-war period, the goal is to trace the emergence of a questioning of this system through experimentation with the very infrastructure itself, however paired with significant misgivings about this project’s criticality, as it dovetails withthe emergence of criticality and creativity with forms of organization as desirable characteristics of the immaterial worker. A line of flight is suggested that does not work dialectically, but rather suggests a persistence of inventiveness with the creation of critical infrastructure, for suggesting new stories to tell that trace pre-existing but non-normative paths through the network. The first step in building a curatorial framework for analyzing both musicfes- tivals and biennales is to examine the early modern universal expositions that they share as common ancestors. Understanding the ideologies that drove these events, which still continue until today, will provide a key to understanding the underlying 32 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

Image 1: SC 1950.82.28. Dickinson Brothers, The Transept, from Dickinson’s Comprehen- sive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, 1854, published, lithograph printed in colour on paper, sheet: 16 x 19 in., Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts

ideologies that continue to drive both contemporary festivals, and their continued growth in new areas of the world. In 1851, what would become known as The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations would open in London’s Hyde Park. By the time it closed, it had attained the dimensions of a megaevent: over the 141 days the exposition was open, it attracted over 6 million visitors and featuring 17 062 exhibitors (Teissl 2013, 28). Comparing this to the relatively well-visited Documenta 14 in 2017, with 891 500 visitors over its hundred days in Kassel, the size of this huge undertaking can begin to be grasped (Documenta/Statista n.d.). The exposition consisted of four sections, raw materials, machines, manufactured goods, and visual art, and was meant as a display of innovation and progress from all participating nations. Nations were defined here as all those nations that participated in global tradeat the time, notably including China (Teissl 2013, 32). The Crystal Palace exhibited a clear desire to present a showcase of all of human production happening at that time. Between the lines, it told a story of global development, one closely linked with the economic and nation-building interests of imperial England. 2 Curating 33

From its emphasis on presenting the British Empire on an “international stage” to its doing so through the means of showing exemplary production from many different countries on that “stage” that was the exhibition hall, the Crystal Palace Exhibition would share many characteristics of later arts festivals and biennales. While it was by no means the first large-scale festival, both it and its successors would define the festival format’s new relationships to capitalist ideology, nationalist sentiment, and a growing educated middle class. As curator Marian Pastor Roces argues, the true subject of the assembled cornu- copia was the concept of capital in all its facets: the capital city, capitalist conquest, even the capitals of letters and columns (as in the title, “The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations”) (2010, 57). It is not by chance that this attempt at unification and representation took place in London in the mid-19th century: the city at the time was the centre of the British Empire, which had grown to immense global importance in issues of trade and governance. The exposition itself was both celebration and assertion of London as the nexus of power via the means of this mega-event. The exposition took place in an enormous temporary construction of glass purpose-built by the architect Joseph Paxton and taken down after its closing. His- torical accounts of the building describe it as a vast palace of cast iron and glass reaching as far as the eye could see, a kind of temple to the exposition of all those artefacts from around the world presented within (see Image 1). Its spatial organization would reveal much of the hidden motivations and significance behind this grand event. What the Crystal Palace Exhibition constructed was nothing less than a prototypical modernist architecture, one which claimed the power of definition of global networks and their relations. Through the construction of its unique architecture of crystal-clear trans- parency, it created an entire system in which the cultures of the world could be subsumed and ultimately brought to heel under the imperial power of its host. The palace’s transept afforded within the building clear views over all the exhibits, putting them into a grand narrative of industrial progress and triumph before the visitor’s eye. The transparent-yet-impermeable glass walls linked the building with the park and the capital city itself, the definitional centre of the exposition, while also containing it. Its spectacular dimensions were a concentration of the city’s aspirations at profiling itself as the central figure on the global stage, spreading “peace and stability” to its colonies around the world. This capacity to define a view and vision for a city and its relationship tothe rest of the world, as well as the concrete economic impact that such a grand event provided to London, proved to be an irresistible model for many major Western seats of imperial power at the end of the 19th century wanting to stake their claim of superiority and centrality on the global stage. Following closely after London, and in a bid to stake its claim to superiority over other American cities, New York 34 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

initiated its own universal exposition in 1853, complete with its own replica of the Crystal Palace. The building, placed in what is now Bryant Park, would dwarf its surroundings, and introduce a new dimension to New York’s skyline (Koolhaas quoted in Roces 2010, 55). An exposition in 1855 in Paris would quickly follow. The number of cities who would come to host such events would from there only grow, including by the end of the century expositions across both Europe, the USA, and Australia with the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition.2

2.1.1 The Scopic Regime of the Crystal Palace

London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 can be understood as a point of concentration of so many relationships between society and practices of display, one that would come to be a central influence on later arts biennales and festivals up until today. In order to understand its significance, it must be understood that the exposition’s mode of display is part of a larger deployment of capitalist-modernist ideology. This means understanding the exposition and its construction asanar- chitectural materialization of a certain ideology relating to both the city and its international relations, particularly relations of coloniality (Roces 2010, 52). To do this, one must first examine the relationship between what is put on display and the conditions of display themselves. In his article “The Crystalline Veil and the Phallomorphic Imaginary,” art historian Donald Preziosi details the nature of this relationship. For him, the Crystal Palace Exhibition was exemplary of a typically modernist system of display, one that would come to establish the basis of art history and exhibition practice in the century to follow. To say that this system is modernist is to understand it as insisting on a particular worldview, one founded on enlightenment principles of rationality and sense, but also on a self-understanding of Europe (and specifically England), as the fore- most innovator in these issues, in other words implying a narrative of teleological progress, with Europe in the lead. This kind of generalization about nation states comes from the particular status that works in the exposition would have. Imagining once again this grand collection of works of art and industry from so many countries brought together, Preziosi argues that:

The artwork (and perforce any palpable cultural artifact, object, or practice) is taken to bear a relationship of resemblance (a metaphorical—and hence substi-

2 TheParisTreatyof1928wouldlatercometoregulatethefrequencyandlistofresponsibilities oftheseuniversalexhibitions.EnforcementofthetreatyismanagedbyBureauInternational des Expositions, also based in Paris. The bureau includes a list of “historically important” universal expositions that predate its founding on its website (Bureau International des Exposi- tions n.d.-a). 2 Curating 35

tutional—relationship) as well as a part-to-whole relation (…[an] index) to its cir- cumstances of production. (Preziosi 2010, 38)

The objects are placed into the Crystal Palace, and are made then to represent something about the conditions of its production, and by extension the culture of its producers. This means that “the art object’s visibility is a function of its legibilityas a symptom of everything and anything that could be plausibly adduced as contribut- ing to its appearance and morphology” (Preziosi 2010, 38). He uses the metaphor of the pantograph, an instrument used to extrapolate drawings to different scales, in order to illustrate this pars pro toto relationship. The exposition, for its part, underlines these relationships via the exhibition concept formed by this ideology, wherein:

Itsexhibitionaryorderwastheidealhorizonandtheblueprintofpatriarchalcolo- nialism;theepistemologicaltechnologyofOrientalismassuch.[6]Itwasthelabo- ratorytableuponwhichallthingsandpeoplescouldbeobjectivelyandpoignantly comparedandcontrastedinauniformandperfectlight,andphylogeneticallyand ontogenetically ranked. (Preziosi 2010, 34)

The collected artefacts of the exposition could be studied, and put into various categories and respective histories. The process of putting these objects in to their systems and ranks, into their relationships with each other, is the double-edged sword of the modernist system of display exemplified by the Crystal Palace Exhibi- tion. The display of these many forms of difference showed a diversity of cultures, but on the precondition of their reduction to legibility within the system at hand, in this way forming the titular “crystalline veil” of Preziosi’s article, which both renders visible and occludes simultaneously. The display and domestication of difference is argued to be the way inwhich the British/European identity and narrative of industrial and societal progress and forward motion from a particular past into a specific future is constituted through the manufacture of the Other. In this way, the project of art history becomes about “staging and envisioning thought—about nations, individuals, ethnicities, races, genders, and classes on behalf of social agendas” who have vested interests in con- trolling the narratives of both the past and the future (Preziosi 2010, 39). This social agenda follows what Preziosi calls modernity’s “core problematic,” namely “the orchestration of orderly, describable, and predictable relations between subjects and between subjects and objects,” the orderliness being achieved through the “laboratory-like” and neutral container of the modernist system of display (40). The functioning of the Crystal Palace becomes then about control and authority over a narrative about the past and the (better) future. Central to the formation of this narrative is not just the inclusion within it, but also the way in which this inclusion is included, in this case through the making of “orderly” relations, or 36 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

ones that flatten forms of difference into “seemingly endless flavors of the same ice cream” (Preziosi 2010, 45). It becomes thus fundamentally a mechanism of de- and re-contextualization of materials, whereby art and industrial production from many different countries are taken out of their contexts, and placed into a new one, the exhibition. It would become this format that would come to be copied across countless museums and galleries far and wide. The Crystal Palace, as the solidification in a building of a particular ideology, can thus be said to produce a scopic regime of the exhibition. This regime is constituted along the axes of both subjectification-via-architecture (both physical and social), as well as de- and re-contextualization of the exhibited objects within.

2.1.2 Modernist Exhibition Practices and the Commodification of the Musical Work at World’s Fairs in England

Before examining the implications of this model for cities as a mode of self-identity, it must be shown that the same system of “objectification” and domestification of the exhibited material at the Crystal Palace Exhibition was also at work in the field of music. Philosopher Lydia Goehr, in her book The Imaginary Museum of Mu- sical Works (1992), provides the necessary historical background in order to show this, and forms an important reference in understanding the transformation of the status of musical performance. Goehr argues that around the turn of the 19th century, musical performance underwent an important transformation in its self-understanding. Whereas music was previously understood as inseparable from its performance, a shift towards music being understood as one of the fine arts alongside painting, sculpture, etc., meant a need for it to be conceived of as a more enduring product, something that could reliably persist from performance to performance (rather than every performance being understood as “based on” e.g. a tune or melody, as is often the case in jazz) (Goehr 1992, 99–100; 152). The result of this change was a renewed emphasis on the score as the locus of “musical work,” or that which is able to preserve the continuity of a musical identity across multiple performances, regulating its derivative interpretations through what Goehr calls an “open concept” (89). Along with this transformation came a shift in the role of the composer, who was now able to mix aspects of the immateriality of musical performance with its commodification (i.e. ability to be separated from the act of its production, herein the form of the score) in new ways, such as the ability to more strongly assert their authorship over the work across its various realizations over time. This shift in the ontological existence of music from its performance toitsex- istence as a musical concept and score created by an author and now relatively stabilized across performances would thus begin to be subjected to a similar set of forces as those being applied to the products of other forms of skilled labour (Goehr 2 Curating 37

1992, 152).3 These forces are namely the modernist-rationalist technologies of display and the scopic regime that would define the format of the universal exposition. The musical work could now fit into a museual ideology just like other objects,its performativity having been stabilized by the concept of the musical work. This process has been examined by musicologist Sarah Kirby, whohasre- searched the modes of exhibition of music in London’s early universal exhibitions. She has found that at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, music was found, on account of its performative nature, too ephemeral to be “shown,” leading to only musical instruments to be exhibited (their commodity status easily corresponding to a museum logic). By the 1873 exposition however, a solution was reached by those concerned with the representation of music at these events to put on daily concerts at the Albert Hall of “high class” music for the duration of the exposition. She argues that this musical exhibition of sorts gave a sense of permanence to the musical offering, effectively arresting the transience of its performative existence in the same way that Goehr argues in The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works above. Though concert programs varied somewhat, works were performed many times over during the 6-month duration of the exposition, achieving a level of permanence of the musical “objects” that she argues were attempts at subverting their performative nature (Goehr 1992, 224). Importantly, Kirby reports as well that works were played in the hall even when nobody was actually listening, further underlining this aspect of the work-as-object. (Kirby 2018, 3–7) This “objectification” of music, and its ontological shift from a performative to work-based artform, meant that its presentation at universal expositions could be subjected to the same processes of subjectification and taste-making that defined the status of the objects that has been examined with the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition. The display of these musical works meant that the instability and capri- ciousness inherent to performativity existed at cross-purposes to the self-reflexive, rationalist/modernist approach to the modernist exhibition, which led to the former being subjugated to the rationality of the score. Just as earlier expositions served the negotiation and establishment of the reputation of objects, so too then could—through repetition and therefore quasi-permanence in presentation—these musical exhibitions serve the negotiation and establishment of the reputation of new musical works and, by extension, their au- thors (who were the composers, not the orchestra, whose performative labour became that of fidelity to the musical work).

3 Thisistosaynothingofthelargerdeploymentoftheconceptofauthorshipthatwouldoccur over the same time period across both the arts and literature. While the concept existed of coursebeforehand,itwould takeonnewmeaning initsrelationship totheconceptof“work” that it stabilizes. See here What is an Author? (Foucault [1969] 1998). 38 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

Discussing how the musical canon could take on the qualities of permanent exhibition at universal expositions is not in order to begin an argument for the analysis of music at world fairs and its relation to canon-formation, as is Kirby’s focus. Rather, the interest in showing this linkage is to highlight how universal expositions played an important part in the establishment of a system where artistic production is commodified so as to conform to a system of normative knowledge- production. In exposing the power of capital in forming this system of knowledge production, a first step has been established in highlighting the nature of therela- tionship between knowledge and power in these large-scale cultural events.

2.1.3 The International Narrative of the Festival

The success of the Crystal Palace Exhibition’s capacity to objectify, and thuscom- modify, a range of human industrial and cultural output means that it still provides a basis for the exhibitionary order as it is familiar to us today. As seen in the previous section, this objectification was also found to be capable of extending tomusic, which is often understood of as performative, and therefore not commodifiable in the same way as other objects able to be separated from the act of their production. Alongside this drive for objectification, and for control of difference that isso crucial to the functioning of the universal exposition, art historian Caroline A. Jones points out how universal expositions have contributed to a lasting understanding of “art as experience” (2010, 69). She connects the universal exposition to an even earlier phenomenon, namely grand tours of Europe as an early form of mass tourism primarily by British, but also by other wealthy continental European no- bility, wherein they would visit important cultural sites and works on the continent in search of the origins of their European cultural heritage (Jones 2010, 73–74). The modernist scopic regime deployed in universal expositions is connected to this history of art-as-experience through the exposition’s relationship to internationality, which will also be an important aspect of the biennale and festival as they develop. In the act of collecting this “representative” assortment of objects from across the world together in one place, organizers are able to bring the world to their audience. Recontextualization however then happens on the terms of the organizers, who are able to design the experience of the relation between the elements on display, stringing it into a new narrative of their own devising. This aspect of creating a survey of international goings-on, putting on display the best that they have to offer, becomes closely linked with the national identity of the host nation, and the cosmopolitan urban centre that houses the exposition. A bringing-together of cultural artefacts from many other places allows for a definition-in-relief of the host city’s identity. The ability to study relationships, differences, and similarities allows for the construction of a relational self-identity, one determined through the construction of a narrative of self and other. Jones likens 2 Curating 39 this to a city and a nation’s desire to put itself (back) on the map: via a collecting and displaying of the “map” itself, the city attempts to insert itself into the diagram by seizing control of the narrative. The (back) in (back) on the map is furthermore key in understanding there- lationship between the universal exposition and subsequent perennial arts events such as festivals and biennales via the notion of experientiality. Putting a city (back) on the map involves not just a definitional act, but also the possibility that this definition must be maintained, that it can fall off the map, and only through sustained definitional effort stay on it, creating a loop of sorts. Significant about thisloop- ing is its repetition, and thus the importance of its experientiality by its audience; the definition of the city must always be (re)performed, e.g. every two yearsvia a biennale. The uncertainty of the claim to representation requires its persistent decoding, the process of looping it and decoding its paradoxes becoming central to its existence.4 (Jones 2011) These aspects of reoccurrence, self-definition, and surveying would cometo be core components of universal expositions subsequent to that in 1851, as well as later arts festivals and biennales, as will be examined in greater depth in the next chapter. They would also prove to be viral concepts that would appear in various forms of both expos and arts events across the world to this day. This is because this aspect of international self-definition, combined with the knowledge-economy hunger for the production of reasoned understandings of international relations, would prove to be important aspects of various modernities globally. This can be seen by looking at how the universal exposition spread afterthe initial Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. This quickly led to fairs in 1855 in Paris, 1862 in London, 1867 in Paris, 1873 in Vienna, 1876 in Philadelphia, 1878 in Paris, 1880 in Melbourne, 1888 in Barcelona, etc.5 Just as these earlier waves of emergence of expos, festivals, and biennales within Europe occurred out of necessity when certain historical conditions were met, so too can the emergence of a large number of new festivals around the world be understood in the same way. Examining the list of 21st century “world expos” (the equivalent to earlier universal expositions), the lineage detailed above continues until today in cities caught up in nation-building, who are still very interested in the format, with e.g. Expo 2015 having taken place in Shanghai, Expo 2020 taking place in Dubai, and a Specialized Expo having taken place in Astana in 2017.

4 This loop can be related to philosopher Timothy Morton’s reading of modernism, which he not only equates with capitalism, but with a specific viral meme he calls agrilogistics, which he argues begins far earlier in human history. See Morton 2016, 84ff. 5 See https://www.bie-paris.org/site/en/all-world-expos for a list of historically-significant world’s fairs since 1851. 40 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

In other words, this explosion of new festivals around the world can be understood within a framework of a modernist aspiration towards self-definition, networking, and putting a city (back) on the map, expressed through cultural production (in the arts). What this implies is a model of multiple modernities, where the concept of modernism is detached from its relationship to the West, where it is best known to have flourished (Eisenstadt 2000, 2–3). Timothy Morton expresses this same sentiment adroitly in writing that:

Although the desire for it first emerged in America, it turns out everyone wants air conditioning. … Likewise obesity isn’t simply American. Americans are not like aspartame, ruining the natural sweetness of other humans. (Morton 2016, 15)

The point being the decoupling of the accoutrement of modernism (air conditioning, arts festivals) from where they first occurred, usually in the West. It ismore broadly an aspect of the Anthropocene, a trait of the concept of the modern human most generally, not reducible to one particular culture or nation. This implies a very different relationship between the festival format and its role in developing countries, one that does not per se need to position itself towards the festival as a “Western” import, but rather as part of a larger, self-determined strategy.6

2.2 The Anatomy of Festivals and Biennales

2.2.1 Fest/ival

The previous section presented the Crystal Palace Exhibition, as well as subsequent universal exhibitions, as a precursor to the practices of museology and art history that still inform our understanding of artistic work today, serving as an important cardinal point for mapping the origination of festivals for arts and culture since the mid 19th century. Before examining arts festivals from the late 19th century until the present, it is important to acknowledge that universal exhibitions should not be thought of as the sole progenitor of contemporary festivals. For instance, theatre festivals in ancient Greece also prove to share many similarities in terms of their array of economic and societal functions with contemporary events (English 2011, 65–66). The- atre scholar Jennifer Elfert furthermore positions the contemporary (theatre) festival within a longer history of the German Festspiel, a format strongly tied with a projection of sovereign power of the Germanic states in the 16th and 17th centuries, and later as a catalyst for German nationalist sentiment as of the late 19th and early

6 “Developing” is meant here in the very concrete sense of investing in the modernist aspirations of self-definition and nation-building. 2 Curating 41

20th centuries (Elfert 2009, 49). Franz Willnauer also supports the emphasis on the Festspiel rather than the universal exposition in his writing on the emergence of music festivals in Germany (Willnauer 2017, 1–2). Such positions point to a second important aspect of the history and emergence of the contemporary festival and its societal role. Sociologists Liana Giorgi and Monica Sassatelli argue that most writing regarding festivals can seemingly be read as some combination of two different perspectives and theoretical framework. There exist firstly readings of the festival phenomenon that, coming from a Bourdieu-inspired standpoint, will tend to see them as sites for the negotiation of community status, or as James English calls it, participation in the “symbolic economy” of cultural capital (Giorgi and Sassatelli 2011, 5; English 2011, 64). Such a focus has also been seen in the reading of the history of the universal exhibition above, and formulations such as those of Roces, who views the true subject of that exhibition format to be capital in all its facets (2010, 57). In other words, the festival is seen as fulfilling various functions relating to the creation and exchange of different forms of capital. Giorgi and Sassatelli’s second perspective on the festival format is the understanding of it as a place for the negotiation also of societal values, and as a form of public sphere. While of course intrinsically linked with the negotiation also of status and exchange value in the symbolic economy, they argue that this reading of the festival stems more from a Habermassian approach (2011, 5). Reading festivals from this perspective connects them to earlier festival formats that have occurred over the course of human history, named variously “primitive” or “traditional” festivals (Foucault 1984, 4; Sassatelli 2011, 13–14), which served an important role in the production and reproduction of society and culture (Giorgi and Sassatelli 2011, 4). Here the role of the festival becomes one of actualizing and (re)affirming community bonds and identity through local co-presence.7 To understand the festival from this societal perspective, the first step is to understand the “fest,” its root and etymological parent.8 The fest, historically a com-

7 AnthropologistGeorginaBorn,inaninvestigationofmusicalhabitsofSoutheastAsiandias- poric youth, calls this phenomenon particularly in the musical realm a “musically imagined community” that is constituted by the microcosm of a local co-present public, but is often afterwards globally-dispersed and existing only through virtual (digital) connections (Born 2005, 29). 8 The word “fest” has been chosen as an English approximation of the German noun Fest. Thoughthewordissimilarinitsconnotations,theOED’sexamplesentencesemphasizemore the light and celebratory aspect of the word more comparable with the German word Feier (party).ThewordshouldbeunderstoodratherinitsGermanconnotationandostensiblyless- frequentsenseinEnglish.Itismoreakintotheless-commonEnglish“holy-day”[sic],withits connotationofadayofreligiousobservanceorreligiousfestival,asopposedtothemorecon- ventional “holiday,” more related already since the 16th century with the “day of recreation,” 42 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

pulsory event for community members, is a site and ritual serving the communication and reproduction of societal order. It is a moment where rules are either set aside or inverted, either out of the necessity of a destabilizing event in the community, or out of the need to reaffirm the values of living together that underpin a community. It is an exceptional situation, and one that serves a variety of functions in ensuring the continued stability of a community. Significantly, the fest and the ritual are frequently associated with various forms of theatre, which can serve just such a function as affirming values, suggesting solutions to conflicts, etc. (Turner 1982, 11). The concept of the fest is an ancient building-block for the maintaining of a community, its core components of the ritual, destabilization of society, and reaffirmation of a societal order are all elements that have been revised within contemporary society. In a section of Theaterfestivals (2009), Jennifer Elfert in her study of the societal phenomenon aligns the formerly-essential fest described above and its now-optional modern descendent, the festival, with ethnologist Victor Turner’s distinction between liminal and liminoid rituals. The main differentiation for Turner revolves around the transformation in the understanding of work and its relationship to play or leisure (which both contains and exceeds play) between pre- and post-industrial revolution societies, respectively. He argues that liminal phenomena are phenomena of passage, of transformation across a threshold, they are all those rituals to prevent the destabilization of a community given events like birth, marriage, death, war, etc. They mark a change in status of a member of the community, and are moments when the ritual, the fest, is needed in order to re-establish stability (Elfert 2009, 76). Liminoid (-oid in the sense of similar) phenomena share characteristics of lim- inality, but are not mandatory, and are less associated with moments of personal or societal crisis in the same fundamental way. They can be similarly transforma- tional, but are opt-in events that exist as offerings to fill the leisure time of post- industrialist workers (Elfert 2009, 76; Turner 1974, 64). These liminoid phenomena, because of their lack of a binding character, allow for the creation of uncoded space where there exists the possibility for the subversion of established values through the creation of “a plurality of alternative models for living, from utopias to programs, which are capable of influencing the behaviour of those in mainstream social and political roles … in the direction of radical change” (Turner 1972, 65). This makes the liminoid character of the festival an ideal instrument for the dissemination of new forms of perception and subjectivity, as discussed in the functioning of the regime of sight deployed with the universal expositions.

onceagainmoreakintothe Feier (Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2018a). This second connotation becomes clear also through its use in the context of this text. 2 Curating 43

The liminoid festival can be further articulated by examining Foucault’s similar concept of “heterotopia” in modern society. For Foucault, the heterotopia is the incarnation of the utopia, the non-place, within a real site. It exists outside of all places, while still existing at a real location, such as a fairgrounds (Foucault 1984, 4). It is a place defined less by the actual set of relations that constitute it in itsspeci- ficity, but rather by their existence as a real screen onto which one canprojecta vision of society in perfected form. Foucault argues that while what he calls “primitive” societies frequently created heterotopias of crisis, akin to Turner and Elfert’s concept of the liminal fest, modern societies are more involved in the production of heterotopias of deviation, ones meant to collect and sometimes contain difference and deviation from the norm. This creation of a temporalized and spatialized moment of deviance will always have a specific, if changing, relationship to the society that it is abstracted from. (Foucault 1984, 4–5). Foucault continues that heterotopias can also exist as heterotopias in time: they can both exist within the normal functioning of time, while also seeming to sus- pend it, as during the intensity and seemingly-stretched “festival time” where so much can be done while the clock moves at a totally unrelated speed to the events in progress. This is a time that is isolated and separate from linear time, whileob- viously in the practical sense of hours and minutes still existing within it. If this is applied back to the core mechanism of the establishment of the festival community, namely its spatial and temporal concentration, then Foucault’s conception helps to conceive of the parameters for the creation of a “rite of passage,” but within the framework of modern society. It also frames the functioning of the festival mechanism on the two axis that constitute it as a category as such: time and space. The festival is a time within time, a suspended, heterotopic time, separate but within and therefore limited. It is also a place within space, somewhere that transformation can occur, but nevertheless somewhere real. A festival can thus be understood as a spatio-temporal concentration with transformative function.

2.2.2 Arts Festivals

While the functioning of the festival format has now been established along two fronts, namely its function as a site for the creation and exchange of forms of capital, and as a site for the (re)constitution of community bonds, what remains to be explored are the specific characteristics of the festivals being examined here, namely contemporary music and arts festivals. This requires a more detailed examination of the historical emergence of festivals exclusively for the arts in the wake of the large-scale universal exhibitions of the late 19th century. Both the Crystal Palace Exhibition and its subsequent descendants in London, Paris, and elsewhere around the globe both were and remain to this day costly, large-scale, and enormous undertakings dealing with works from all areas of the 44 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

world and many facets of society. The sheer size of these events led to manyof their characteristics being distilled and reduced down to “leaner,” purely artistic festivals. These have proven to be (comparatively) smaller affairs that could still function as these large feats of self-definition both for cities and for nations. They maintained the aspirations to the projection of power on the international stage as in the universal expositions, importing much of the formats and working methods, but doing so through a focus exclusively on visual art, music, and theatre/opera. The arts thus become the quintessential brokers of internationality, representing particular ethnic and national values and meanings via the communication vessel of art, which becomes de- and re-contextualized thanks to the modernist system of display, and is thus able to circulate within the smooth non-place of the festival. Looking again to art historian Caroline A. Jones, she writes that “the twenti- eth century witnessed the dramatic shift …, when the energies of the world’s fairs were appropriated by the trade-specific biennial form” (2010, 81). This miniaturiza- tion of the universal exposition brought with it the importation of many of those characteristics of the grander format, and by extension also its deployment of rep- resentationality as explored earlier. Jones makes this link as well, writing she is focusing on clarifying that

the sets of values and cultural practices inculcated by such large-scale international exhibitions. Seeded by the event of the [world’s] fair, these practices could involve impressive diplomatic events, scholarly conferences …, spectacular images, celebrated works of art,collectible objects […,] as well as new experiences (and thus new subjectivities) for the middle class. (2010, 80)

The functioning of this system of display becomes an apparatus of education forits visitors, understood here in the sense of a carefully orchestrated showing and seeing in the name of a particular enlightenment agenda, exemplified through these cultural practices carried over from the universal expositions. The concentration of factors listed above were all meant to elicit a specific form of education of visitors. These events were built and billed as special events, moments to be experienced. Their concentration allowed them to create dense moments of exchange, their distinction from everyday life allowed them to take on characteristics of the ritual, bringing with it aspects of transformation, and of transforming subjectivities. All these factors can be seen with the founding of the Venice Biennale in 1895. Though the Venice Biennale in the form it is known today has been the result ofover a century of development of its form, it is nevertheless widely regarded as marking with its inaugural edition the first arts biennale, and has come to represent the “ur-biennial” that others would necessarily stand in some relationship to (either in rejection or in affirmation of its organizational decisions). The most basic characteristics of the arts biennale, while taking sometimeto be properly established in the way they are now known, align with this view of the 2 Curating 45 biennale as a purely-artistic, scaled-down descendant of the universal exposition. Like its predecessor, its internationality would come to be one of its defining characteristics (seen for instance with Venice’s often problematic system of national pavilions). So too would its emphasis on periodicity—memorialized through the now-eponymous term “biennale,” which effectively promises a repetition every second year. The aspect of capital (and Capital) central to earlier universal expositions is also clearly present as of the beginning of the biennale, with one of its original goals being the hope of re-establishing an art-market in Venice, a formerly-thriv- ing city for art (a goal which largely succeeded), and stymying urban decline (Jones 2010, 73; Papastergiadis and Martin 2011, 46). The Venice Biennale is thus significant not just for the persistence of itsartistic offering since 1895, but also related to this continuing presence its outsized influence on the discourse around perennial arts events (Filipovic 2010, 326). This can be seen, among other places, in the use of the Italian spelling of biennale, rather than the English biennial, to brand other perennial arts festivals around the world. Though the Venice Biennale is a main stay of the discourse around biennales, this discourse itself is not without its share of issues. Perhaps one of its most well- established points is the issue of a lack of adequate and quality scholarship on the issue of biennales perennial arts events both historically and in terms of a theoretical framework.9 This in turn connects with a position within the related discourse on curating regarding a lack of scholarship and research on exposition history (see section 2.4.1). Its most significant issue however is that, despite frequent cross-citations among festivals and biennales, music and arts events stemming from the tradition of the universal expositions are not often considered by scholars or practitioners to exist within the same genealogy. Though especially in earlier festivals, material/medial differences in the cultural offerings being presented were surely

9 On the lack of an established discourse around biennales, Filipovic writes that “despite the number of symposia, lectures, and debates that biennials have inspired, little sustained critical assessment of the phenomenon – in all its specificities and implications – has yet been carried out” (2010, 16). Fleck writes that “there existed no comprehensive presentation of the Venice Biennale, despite it being the most influential art event of the last century” before his attempt to do so (Fleck 2009, 7; translation added). See also (Teissl 2013, 13). Original text by Fleck: "Bei der Vorbereitung für die Einzelausstellung [an dem österreichischen Pavillion der Biennale von 2007], entdeckte ich, dass es keine zusammenfassende Darstellung der Bi- ennale von Venedig gibt, obgleich es sich um die historische bedeutendste Kunstveranstal- tung des letzten Jahrhunderts handelt" (Fleck 2007, 7). Alloway’s 1968 study of the Venice biennale should be understood as a notable exception here, see Alloway 1968. NB: This volume makes use of German-language sources. In the interest of monolingual legibility, these have been translated by the author in the running text. These instances are marked with the words“translationadded”intheparentheticalreferences,andtheoriginalGerman-language source is quoted in full in corresponding footnotes. 46 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

relatively clear in a simplistic sense (theatre/music performances at fixed times vs. paintings hung for a duration), not only do these events share a common point of origin, but their underlying characteristics and historical developments track to each other. This can be seen in the lack of acknowledgement and examination withinthis discourse of analogous important artistic festivals beginning around the same time, and which also continue until today. For instance, Verena Teissl points out that the Bayreuther Festspiele, begun in 1876, can be significantly established as the first purely artistic festival that comes out of this same spirit of the universal expositions, not, as stated by Jones and others, the Venice Biennale some time later (2013, 13). The following sections will explore the parallels between these arts festivals in both the performing and visual arts, highlighting the common characteristics that unite these festival events in order to begin to understand them in a unified way.

2.2.3 General Characteristics of Arts Festivals

The consensus around the definition of the arts festival seems to be that thereisa lack of consensus—the mutability of its form appears to be one of its most fundamental characteristics (Elfert 2009, 21; Willnauer 2017, 2; Filipovic, van Hal, Øvstebø 2010, 19). However, despite the heterogeneity of cultural projects that can be given the title “festival,” the term nevertheless is not resistant to definition. As theatre scholar Jennifer Elfert writes, “despite a tendency … to transgress boundaries, festivals are comparable to each other, and therefore also fundamentally definable” (Elfert 2009, 23; translation added).10 This section will look specifically at howthe basic festival schema refracts into symptoms of current performing arts festivals and arts biennales, in order also to establish a field of common ground between them.

Limited Time-Frame and Periodic Repetition Most festivals take place over a limited amount of time and recur with some degree of regularity. While specific institutional constellations and project-management considerations necessary for realizing the festival, such as funding deadlines and size of staff, can have a large influence on their individual lengths, general ten- dencies are nevertheless discernable. At the lower limit, many shorter performing arts festivals can last as little as one or two days (often on the weekend) of intense programming, as is often seen for instance in the German free theatre scene. More standard-length performing arts festivals consist of around a week of events

10 “Trotz … Tendenzen zur Grenzverwischung … sind Festivals untereinander vergleichbar und damit auch grundsätzlich definierbar geblieben.” 2 Curating 47 or evening concerts (often 9–10 days, which includes two weekends), such as the Maerzmusik festival at the Berliner Festspiele every March, or the Ultima Festival in Oslo. Sometimes they can last up to a month of often more diffused programming, like Wien Modern or Steirischer Herbst in Graz, which often have more dark days and a less concentrated program. Characteristic of festivals for music is also that most seem to occur annually, with only some happening in the two-year rhythm more characteristic of fine arts biennales. Among these exceptions include Maerz- musik’s predecessor, the Music Biennale Berlin, as well as the Munich Biennale for New Music Theater, and the Darmstadt Summer Course (yearly from 1946 until 1970, then biennial). Theatre or performing arts festivals can also be of this length, however seem to take place over a slightly longer period of time of 3 weeks (Berlin Theatertreffen) to one month (Salzburger Festspiele, Ruhrtriennale). Visual arts biennials tend to be longer, not least because they are normally object- and thus exhibition-based (and therefore presumably are subject to a different set of economic calculations regarding visitor numbers), however the longest still last only several months (documenta traditionally for 100 days, the Venice Bi- ennale lasts about 6 months).11 When it comes to biennale exhibitions, the Paris Convention of 1928, which the Bureau International des Exhibition (BIE) uses to govern the parameters of world expos (the direct descendants of earlier universal expositions), sets out in its Article 4 that the duration of international exhibitions “may not be less than three weeks nor more than three months” in order to be recognized (Bureau International des Expositions n.d-b, 8). This codification is a useful rule of thumb, not least because of the BIE’s longstanding position within the field. Regardless of exact length, in contrast to a yearly museum exhibition program, symphony orchestra season, or ensemble theatre program, a festival or biennale implies is a concentration of activity, attention, and effort within a short period of time. Festivals thus operate on a kind of project-basis, also in their administrative structure, rather than through sustained, continuous commitment.

Spatial Concentration Festivals and biennales occupy one or more museums, arts spaces, or performance venues for the duration of their exhibition period. These spaces are sometimes purpose-built, happen in public space in the city or the region, or some mix of the above. They normally occur within a relatively small geographical area, which allows visitors to visit most or all of the sites with relative ease.

11 See the production issues surrounding the Lithuanian Pavilion of the 2019 Venice Biennale, which had trouble financing its opera installation over the biennale’s 6 months, an example of the problems that arise when these two different time scales meet (“Their Beach Opera Won at the Biennale. But They Can Hardly Afford It.,” New York Times, 31 May, 2019). 48 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

Purpose-built spaces for a biennale can best be seen in the various national pavilions of the Venice Biennale. Each pavilion in the Giardini is built by an individual nation, who is responsible also for its design. In the particular case of the Venice Biennale, this pavilion system translates the participation of international artists directly to their affiliation with various nation-states, by way of the pavilions they must exhibit in. While many subsequent biennales have rejected this system as obsolete, among other issues because of this insistence that artists represent the values and art of a particular nation (once again an affirmation of the modernist exhibition values discussed in section 2.1.1), art historian Caroline A. Jones makes the argument that “the pavilion component of biennale culture in Venice has proved useful. Pavilions have allowed the problematization of both spectacle and the ethnic state” (Jones 2010, 83). Artists such as Haacke, who in 1993 smashed and destroyed the gran- ite floor of the German pavilion built by Hitler as part of his Nazi art policy, are thus given a clear frame to also call into question the presumptions of the nation- state, which for better or worse still has an enormous impact on contemporary reality.12 The flipside are situations such as when in 2015, 10 Chinese artists andonly 2 Kenyan artists were shown in the Kenyan pavilion at the biennale, in a move that seemed to represent a moment of neocolonialism (Muñoz-Alonso 2015). In an example from another context, recent editions of Documenta make clear that spatial concentration within one city can also be questioned and experimented with, precisely in order to question this norm. For instance, one can look to Docu- menta 14’s decision to take place in both Athens and Kassel, Documenta 13’s exhibition in Kabul, or how document 11’s opening in Kassel was understood as the fifth and final of a series of platforms that Okwui Enwezor organized on four different continents for evidence of this. As will be argued in the next section, these important exceptions are all reactions to this phenomenon of spatial concentration. Spatial concentration is also seen in performing arts festivals as well. Wagner’s famous Festspielhaus in Bayreuth was purpose-built in order to gather a public for whom he could stage his works in what he considered to be ideal conditions. The Festspiele concept, itself informed by Greek theatre festivals, that informed Wag- ner’s approach puts a strong emphasis on the aspect of play (spiele) in the sense of recreation, communion, and gathering for the theatre play itself. This is in turn related to having company in the sense of the Latin com/panis, the breaking of bread together (or bratwurst in Bayreuth), to mark an occasion (an event, temporally- bound), to have a meeting, to conduct business, and to strengthen community bonds. The Festspielhaus’ spatial concentration and nexus of activity can alsobe seen in more recent buildings such as the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, which the

12 Joneshasalsoreferredtothisasconducting“politicsbyothermeans,”inwayssimilartoother international events such as the Olympics, or sports leagues (Jones 2010, 77). 2 Curating 49 organization in its newly-combined form has occupied since 2001, or the Grosses Festspielhaus for the Salzburger Festspiele, since 1960.

City (Marketing) and Centre/Periphery The Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851 brought together works from allthe nations doing trade with the British Empire at that time in a celebration of London as the capital, the centre of that empire. The Crystal Palace itself was an instrument for the domestication of difference into a singular national narrative. It was also, in its position as a glass house in Hyde Park, meant to evoke an exchange between city and exhibition, going as far as to integrate the park’s trees directly into the building itself. Since that time, festivals and biennales have been an important mechanism whereby cities—and their tourism boards—are made to be part of the backdrop against which the artistic practice is seen. This profiling can be seen to occur historically at the earliest festivals exclusively for the arts, such as in Venice or Salzburg (Papastergiadis and Martin 2011, 46; Haitzinger 2013, 132). This occurs today also with regions that seek this level of recognition as well, something that can be seen with the Ruhrtriennale in the Ruhr valley of Germany, with Manifesta, which calls itself the “European Biennial of Contemporary Art,” and takes place within a different European city every second year, highlighting it on a European stage, or the European Capital of Culture program, which is often understood by cities to be part of a larger urban regeneration plan led driven by culture (Sassatelli 2011, 21). As with the world exposition in London, the city itself becomes a co-actor in the event, framing it as “a central node within global production networks” (O’Neil 2012, 53). Aside from the quantifiable interest in a festival by tourism groups interested in increasing their hotel occupancy rates, they also have the potential to generate attention to a city’s place within these global networks. Framing the relationships between global currents and local effects allows cities to increase their brand recognition. As city marketing becomes an important tool for attracting both tourism and business interests, it is unsurprising that festivals often tend to be initiated in cities normally deemed as on the periphery of global currents, rather than in their centres.13 This effect has been studied in relation to biennales for the visual arts:Fig- ure 1, taken from an article by Ronald Kolb and Shwetal A. Patel, illustrates the distribution of visual arts biennales among centres, 2nd tier, and peripheral cities worldwide, sorted by continent (Kolb and Patel 2018). More important than the relative number of biennales per region is the relative consistency with which they

13 Seeherealsothepublication Eventisierung der Stadt (Muri et al. 2019). 50 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

are distributed here between first-tier, second-tier, and peripheral cities.14 Notice for instance in the case of North America that there are even less biennales in first- tier cities compared to second and third-tier cities.

Figure 1: Chart by Kolb and Patel of Distribution of Biennials among Central (yellow), 2nd Tier (green), and Peripheral Cities (red), sorted by continent.

Kolb and Patel 2018. Pay attention to the relative number of biennales in first-tier, second- tier, and peripheral cities within each region, rather than the total numbers across regions. Image reproduced with permission from Kolb and Patel, and OnCurating Journal.

Such numbers support the argument that second-tier and peripheral cities have been central to the biennale form since its establishment with the Venice biennale in the late 19th century. The organizers chose as the site of the biennale the

14 KolbandPatelconsiderfirsttiercitiesthe“nationscapital[sic]or…oneofitsmaincities(e.g. Istanbul is not a capital city, but it holds an important economic, cultural, and social position in Turkey).” Second-tier cities are “not as big as the capitals, but are on the rise and hold a prominent position within the country.” Finally, the third group is made up of biennales taking place in “remote and peripheral regions.” (Kolb and Patel 2018) 2 Curating 51

Giardini pubblici in the eastern part of the city created by Napoleon during his rule. The choice of this contentious historical site was a strongly political statement. As art historian Caroline A. Jones writes:

Venice, the former republican city-state capable of snubbing Rome’s authority for 500yearsbuthumiliatinglyconqueredbytheFrenchattheturnofthenineteenth century, could now demonstrate its importance to the young nation of Italy … As a portal to the world, it could both be a leading component of the nation-state (thereby flattering its king) and assert its time-honored international identity as a cosmopolitan center of the liberal arts and free speech. (2010, 75–76)

With its new arts biennale, Venice was engaged in a symbolic (re)claiming of its status as an important city on the international stage. The impetus for putting the city “[back] on the map,” for self-definition and identity of a city or nation was achieved through the “pedagogical promise to visitors to bring them the world” (Jones 2010, 76). Thus, in a seemingly-paradoxical turn, an affirmation of (participation in) nationhood came along with a turn to internationality, to bringing in others and stitching together through festival-making those relationships between the self and the world. In this way, the self becomes preconditioned on the definition of an outside other, and by extension the nation is constituted through the display of alterity. This phenomenon can be seen to exist also in biennales that take place outside of the West, and seems to be part of the ideological software that has made festivalization a highly important format for the arts in the 21st century. For instance, the biennale in Gwangju understood itself as part of a process of “shifting gravity,” i.e. the growing influence of Asian biennales in relation to those in the West, which was also the title of the World Biennial Forum N°1 that took place as part of the 2012 biennale in that city (Hou and Meta Bauer 2013, 19–20). This recognition led to an interrogation on behalf of the Gwangju Biennale as to its second-tier status in relation to the institutions of the West (Lee 2013, 88). Furthermore, casting the biennale in terms of this East–West shift allows for it to explore through the forum of the arts ways in which this is occurring, what is happening to the dominant global narrative as told by Western institutions, and the implications of the “rest” (colonialized places and sites of orientalist projection) affirming their place on the global stage. A similar tendency towards a re-imagination of the periphery can also be seen to have basis in the history of arts festivals. Teissl argues that since the very beginning of their rise in prominence in the 19th century, arts festivals have sought out the periphery as a space that allows for a bit of escape from the watchful eyes of powerbrokers in major cities and cultural centres (2014, 81). She cites the founding of the Cannes film festival in the French Riviera, as well as the festivals in Bayreuth and Venice all as examples of festivals founded outside of major centres out of a 52 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

need to establish less codified spaces (82). They were spaces that were able to support a counterculture, or experimental practices and formats that would not have been possible elsewhere (ibid.). Similar stories can be told of Donaueschingen, Salzburg, Darmstadt, Graz, Kassel, Avignon, Shenzhen, etc. For many of these places, the periphery has historically functioned as a kind of retreat from or tension with, the metropolis, like with Foucault’s heterotopia, located in the real world but somehow suspended from its surroundings (see section 2.2.1). The periphery seems to lend itself well tothe establishment of these heterotopia; the isolation offered by these places, their dis- tance from the discussions and watchful eyes of the centre’s influencers allow for precisely the kind of festival community to be constructed that is so crucial to the festival’s functioning as a place of transformation.

Explosive Growth Returning to the concept of the fest can help unlock another aspect of this will towards internationality of festivals and biennales. Both the fest and the festival are strongly associated with moments of self-definition and self-positioning. In the archaic version of so-called “pre-modern” societies, these rituals needed to be carried out at moments that threatened to destabilize the community, such as births, deaths, and transitions of power. Because of their large scale and high level of societal visibility, modern festivals and biennales are attractive for their ability to bring in tourism, as well as their power to define both a national and artistic narrative for their visitors, whichlead them to often put on by similarly-important stakeholders. The study by Kolb and Patel sheds light onto this, examining what funding bodies have historically been responsible for the founding of biennales. They break down the list of stakeholders into the categories of “artists and curators; private foundations; museums; govern- ments; tourism councils; and academics” (Kolb and Patel 2018). What these stakeholders have in common is a shared interest in defining and shaping large-scale national and international narratives about the arts, but also about the societies in which they exist more generally. Once again, they use the same art historical software seen in the Crystal Palace where art is used as a foil for the societal context in which it has emerged. These stakeholders spring into action in moments of definitional crisis forso- ciety, and attempt, through the festival form, to re-stabilize societal norms and narratives in their own interests. In the normative account of the development of biennales, their post-1989 growth is a highly-theorized point. This moment marked a veritable explosion of biennales all around the world, and in particular in China, where they still continue to grow at a rapid rate. This leads to a typical “hockey- stick” graph illustrated again by Kolb and Patel in Figure 2. What it shows is re- 2 Curating 53 flected also in the discourse about biennales, for instance when Elena Filipovic in her preface to the Biennale Reader writes that “it would take until the nineteen- nineties, when an exponential expansion of the genre occurred with the launching of more than a dozen new biennials, for the term to become the household name with which we are now familiar” (Filipovic et al. 2010, 14). Paul O’Neil concurs with the same trend, however puts it within a framework of the becoming-global of visual arts, writing that:

Manifesta; the biennials of Berlin, Tirana, Lyon, and Istanbul; and many of the smaller peripheral biennials, triennials, and quadrennials established across the globe during the 1990s, have all tended to employ a transnational approach, with local artistic production being taken as the main point of departure linked to global networks of artistic production with a handful of roving curators at the helm. (O’Neil 2012, 67–68)

Figure 2: Chart by Kolb and Patel of number of total biennales globally since 1895 “Prolifer- ation (cumulative) of Biennales World wide [sic] (1895–2018)”.

Kolb and Patel 2018. Image reproduced with permission from Kolb and Patel, and OnCurat- ing Journal. 54 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

This same sentiment is also echoed by Kolb and Patel, who affirm again thisconclu- sion that “the proliferation of biennials accelerated from the mid 1980s, in particular from the mid 1990s onwards” (Kolb and Patel 2018). However, as stated in section 2.2.2, these biennales must be examined within a shared history together with performing arts festivals. Doing this, Kolb and Patel’s affirmation of the widely-held conclusion becomes only one part of the story. What this data shows is 1. The extent to which the term “biennale” has seenan expansion in its use worldwide. This relates to a tendency towards an expansion of existing terms has led to an increased frequency of the use of the term in general. 2. The proliferation of the biennale format within countries that are experiencing their own modernisms and moments of national self-definition on the global stage. This can be attributed to the position taken by O’Neil that the format ofthebien- nale began to deal with non-Western artistic production in a significant way as of around 1989. As O’Neil explains:

Biennales are an efficient means by which these localities can map out a place for themselves, at a global level, to become one point in the networked communication between other biennials. (O’Neil 2012, 70)

However, what is significantly missing from this chart are the multiple wavesof fairs, festivals, and biennales that have swept across the globe since the mid 19th century. Tracing this history while looking past just the use of the term biennale suggests a different narrative. What it reveals is that fairs, festivals, and biennales are all founded in variously situated historic “explosions,” as moments of definitional crisis sweep across the stakeholders able and willing to found them. While thorough tracking of all these different perennial cultural events goes beyond the scope of this work (see here however again the exhaustive attempt to do so by Kolb and Patel 2018), what can roughly be considered four different waves of “festive explosions” seem to be able to be identified. Note that the magnitude of these waves (the number of festivals and biennales, their significance and relationship to one-another) could not yet be adequately studied. The first of these is the post-1851 interest in the universal exposition format, with fairs subsequently opening in 1855 in Paris, 1862 in London, 1867 in Paris, 1873 in Vienna, 1876 in Philadelphia, 1878 in Paris, 1880 in Melbourne, 1888 in Barcelona, etc.15 Overlapping with these early expositions were also early artistic festivals in Eu- rope, starting with both Wagner’s Bayreuth in 1876 and the Venice Biennale in 1895. This wave would continue with the and Salzburger Festspiele as of 1920, regarded as one of the most important, together with Bayreuth, of the pre-war festivals, as well

15 See again https://www.bie-paris.org/site/en/all-world-expos for a list of historically-significant world’s fairs since 1851. 2 Curating 55 as Donaueschinger Kammermusiktage as of 1921, and Venice’s addition of music in 1930 and film in 1932. These early festivals can be described as the growth of a consciousness about the role of the universal exposition in helping to defining a city’s role in an international context, with the concept of internationalism being defined in various ways based on local situations. It also is time where the extension of this thinking to smaller, exclusively artistic festivals occurs. What is also already in place in this era is the groundwork for further post-war festivals throughout the rest of the 20th century. Festivals in the post-war period would largely be modelled, or explicit differentiations from, the forms of organization created in this early wave in Bayreuth, Venice, Salzburg, etc. As a second wave, the post-war period marked a renewed interest in the festival and the biennale, especially in Germany, but also within a newly configured global picture. Elfert for instances lists 18 festivals founded around Europe between 1946 and 1950 (Elfert 2009, 28). To this can be added important arts festivals like Docu- menta 1 in 1955 (see section 2.3.1), and the São Paolo in 1951, which sought for itself an identity within the Brazilian nation compared to Rio (Jones 2010, 76). The post- war festival period saw the rise of a new kind of internationalism, expressed also through the founding of important biennales in Paris, Tokyo, and Sydney. While systematic academic analysis beyond individual festivals of this mid-century internationalism seems relatively scarce, it is still seen as the precursor to the broader globalization of the biennale format as of the late 1980s (70). Many of these post-war festivals were positioned as celebrations of humanity in the face of the trauma of the world wars. Particularly in the context of occupied Germany, these festivals would also serve, as has been previously established, as places where (both) new nations could shape and project their new values, be they those of artistic freedom of expression in the West, or the struggle against oppres- sion in the East.16 This boom in new festivals would continue at a significant rate until around the time of the 1968 student protests, when the founding of festivals would slow once again. Elfert claims this is due to the younger generation’s view of festivals as being reactionary, unpolitical, and consumption-oriented (2009, 29). After a period with less festival and biennale growth around the 1970s, there emerges with the fall of the iron curtain and the expansion of the capitalist narrative and Western values across the globe a fertile ground for new growth in festivals and biennales. With this would come the post-1989 expansion discussed earlier, and with it the growth of a global system of arts festivals and institutions worldwide. While festivals founded immediately post-WWII can be seen mostly within the framework of Western capitalism outlined above, those founded in this era can be

16 SeeErnstReuter’sspeechontheoccasionofthefirst Berliner Festwochen (Berliner Festspiele 1998, 2). 56 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

defined by the adaptation of this narrative of the construction of national identity and aesthetic values to many emerging economies outside of the West, and particularly in Asia (which shows similar percentage-wise growth to other continents, but whose number of biennales is second only to Europe in absolute numbers). Even when these biennials do not actively thematize their relationships to the West and to the Venice model, the appropriation of this form of “festive” knowledge-creation in the service of non-Western emerging powers can already be seen in itself as a repudiation of a universalist, Western-centric worldview in favour of a model of multiple modernities, although this too is a controversial issue (Bradley 2003, 88–89).

Exceptionalism in Presentation Never before in the history of the world was there so large a collection of valuable gems and exquisite specimens of the lapidary’s art collected in one building. … Never was there such a display of these gems as in our Crystal Palace. The Exhibi- tion contains the finest diamonds, the finest ruby, and the finest emerald known to the world. (Great Exhibition 1851, 1)

As this quote from the Crystal Palace Exhibition guidebook The Illustrated Exhibitor shows, perhaps the most important characteristic of those cultural artefacts presented in festivals is the exceptionalism of that which is on display. At the Crystal Palace, the diamond in question was the Indian Koh-i-Noor diamond, in posses- sion of the British Monarchy, whose provenance is now being questioned.17 The “gems” presented at other, subsequent festivals would vary greatly in kind, but would have in common the creation of a special occasion on which to view equally special works, ones that would unable to be seen by most people, or be able to be presented the quotidian programming of an arts space. The event of viewing thus becomes an important part of the ritual of festival-going. Exceptionalism can be created through novelty or newness, as is the case with contemporary classical music (CCM) festivals, which often involve a large number of newly-commissioned works. In the case of other music festivals, the staging of works that otherwise would not be able to be staged either for practical reasons, or because they are a rarity in the repertoire can also create forms of newness. This is perhaps most famously the case at the Bayreuther Festspiele, which are dedicated to the presentation of Wagner’s operatic works; massive undertakings that are difficult for even large opera houses to pull off successfully (see here the case of Robert LePage’s Ring at the Metropolitan Opera). Other examples include festivals dedicated to the serial

17 BBC. “Koh-i-Noor: India says it still wants return of priceless diamond” BBC News, 20 April, 2016. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-36088749. 2 Curating 57 performance of a specific composer’s work, such as a concert series dedicated to the performance of all of Beethoven’s nine symphonies at the Salzburger Festspiele 2018. A last form of exceptionalism can be found in reactions to the specificities of the site of the festival. The Festival Rümligen in Switzerland (of which the Munich Biennale’s Daniel Ott is a director) often puts a particular emphasis on its relationship to its surrounding nature, as well as its surrounding community (Ott and Zytynska 2016, 9). Site-specificity is also a very common approach to exceptionalism in arts biennales, where there is a robust history of relating artistic production to its site of display. An example of this is once again Haacke’s Germania at the Ger- man Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1993. Another is the British Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale: Entitled ISLAND, the pavilion did not display any objects, but rather invested in a discursive program around issues of decolonization, islands, borders, and migration. In this way it attempted to address the reality of the physical building itself (situated at the highest point on the island) and its role in the Giardini, as well as issues of migration and their relationship to Venice and Italy, and how these local issues interconnect with the international networks that connect at the node of the Biennale (British Council n.d.). Elena Filipovic warns though of the danger that this exceptionality can present to the artistic rigour of a festival. Keeping in mind the quote at the top of the section about the chance to see the Koh-i-Noor diamond at the Crystal Palace, she warns of the problem of so-called “biennale art,” or an art of “bombastic proportions and hollow premises” (Filipovic 2010, 326). Her diagnosis is to argue that these failed attempts at exceptionalism occur when mega-exhibitions like biennales become too spectacular or commodified, and cow too much to market interests, inother words, when they fail to use their exceptionality as moments to defy traditional institutional order (327).

Networking and Politics by Other Means The biennale and the festival being places of gathering, exchange, and networking, Jones makes the point that they can also function as places to practice “’politics by other means’” (Jones 2010, 83; see also Roche 2011, 136–137). This means that in their function as places to gather and to form common experiences, perennial arts events have the possibility of increasing dialogue and decreasing hostility between groups. This can be seen to be the case in explicitly artistic projects, such asFlorian Malzacher’s Truth is Concrete as part of the 2012 Steirischer Herbst festival, which brought together over 200 artists, academics, and activists all working at the cross- section between art and activism for a 24/7 event lasting for an entire week (see section 3.4.2). 58 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

Less drastic, but also more germane are all the many moments of informal contact and exchange that happen at these concentrated gatherings of people. Jennifer Elfert, in expanding on her definition of the festival, mentions the importance of festivals also as networking events, functioning as a place for the establishment and renewal of networks between artists and arts organizations (Elfert 2009, 83). Elfert also argues that part of a festival’s specificity is its liveness, which stabilizes intergroup contact, and ensures culpability for bad behavior, meaning participants are subjected to peer pressure to be held immediately accountable for their behaviour. This aspect of festivals is part of a festival’s ability to promote instead ofviolent opposition instead the peaceful resolution of conflict (84–85). Elfert confirms and extrapolates on the claim made by Jones that the festival can work as a place to do “politics by other means.” This also corresponds with the concept of bringing groups together to hash out their differences within the nor- malizing forum of the festival can be seen in Florian Malzacher’s interpretation of the concept of agonism developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (2013) (Malzacher 2014a, 119–120). Elfert’s contention is also supported by finding in contemporary social psychol- ogy, with the concept of intergroup contact theory. First put forward by Gordon W. Allport in 1954, the theory contends that intergroup contact can have positive effects on reducing bias among participants, given that four key conditions are fulfilled. These are namely 1. Equal status of all participants within the situation, suchas in the military. 2. Common goals, such a mixed-group team trying to win a game together 3. Intergroup cooperation, such as working together to achieve a task, and 4. The support of authorities or customs, who sanction this intermixing. (Pettigew 1998, 66–67) There are some latent issues to the theory, such as the contention that intergroup contact is subject to inherent selection bias that “prejudiced people may avoid contact with out-groups” (Pettigew 1998, 69), and that some intergroup contact may increase prejudice. According again to Pettigrew in a later study, “[t]hese situations frequently occur in work environments where intergroup competition exists as well as in in situations involving intergroup conflict” (Pettigrew et al. 2011, 277). Nevertheless, in a 2011 meta-analysis of 515 studies in this field of research around this topic, Pettigrew et al. concluded that intergroup contact “typically re- duces prejudice” (Pettigrew et al. 2011, 271). Furthermore, they also state that “[t]he meta-analysis found that contact effects typically do generalize to the entire groups involved,” meaning that the effect expanded beyond the immediate situation, as well as that the “findings reveal a remarkable universality of intergroup effects,” meaning that the effects of this contact are statistically significant across many kinds of groups (age, gender, or geographical location) (276). 2 Curating 59

Questioning the Power to Make Worlds While analogies can be drawn between the biennales of the visual arts and performing arts festivals in many of areas that have been listed above, the main differentiating factor between these two kinds of cultural events lies in the approach that they exhibit towards these categories. Specifically, it is within contemporary visual arts biennales globally that a clear acknowledgement and critique of their in- debtedness to modernist structures and values is explicitly thematicized. Though not entirely absent from performing arts festivals, particularly in theatre, such a self-reflexive turn, understanding the festival as a site specifically of critical knowledge production, is a characteristic much more clearly associated with visual arts biennales. Historically, earlier biennales were often engaged with the reception of works on display, criticizing them, folding them into a discourse, into a history. Begin- ning in the post-war period, biennials, including already-established ones in the West, began to question their own structural disposition towards world-building and their relationship to state and economic power. They began during this time for instance exploring structural alternatives to the Venice model, such as the São Paolo Biennale’s decision to create a biennale without national pavilions already in 1951, a model followed as well by the Gwangju Biennale as well (Jones 2010, 83). Rather than being sites for the critique of works, they increasingly have come to act as sites for the critique of the theories and ideologies that establish the conditions for criticism in the first place. The goal of this re-examination of theory and the structures of knowledge-production has been to stop serving as spectacles to reproduce the colonizer’s gaze, as was the case as of the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851. Instead, many attempt to “outstare the colonizer’s gaze” and establish themselves in embattled sites in an attempt to “’exorcise political traumas’” (Martínez quoted in Roces 2010, 53). What is meant by this is precisely an attempt at subverting the scopic regime of modernism that has been laid out in the exploration of the Crystal Palace. The regime in question places importance on the deployment of the exhibition space as a representational container in which narratives suitable to hegemonic power can be manufactured and impressed upon its subjects. Understanding the nature and operation of this container will help to trace the path that can be taken to escape it. The Crystal Palace, with its system of manufacturing a gaze on the objects contained within it, makes a fundamental presumption and separation between its mechanisms of display—lighting, architecture, staging, etc., and the objects being displayed—objects of industry, art, performances. This is a tidy separation of background, or stagecraft, and foreground, or the objects on display. Underlying this separation is what philosopher Timothy Morton would call the concept of world. A world is the result of just such aesthetic effects—like those used 60 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

in stagecraft or exhibition design, which produce and maintain a certain illusion that obscures the seams where the effect breaks down, or that hide the gaps in a co- hesive story. In Morton’s telling, the concept of world can be understood as “ more or less a container in which objectified things float or stand,” in the sense thatit flattens relations and oversimplifies connections (Morton 2013, 99). This drastic reduction in complexity disregards anything that does not fit within its “world” which place the exhibited materials within a teleological history of industrial progress, and the triumph and inevitability of British colonial power. The Crystal Palace, and the system of its functioning for the manufacturing of a specific narrative and form of subjectivity, is just such a kind of world.As Morton continues, “[t]he idea of world depends on all kinds of mood lighting and mood music, aesthetic effects that by definition contain a kernel of sheer ridicu- lous meaninglessness” (2013, 105). The mood lighting and aesthetic effect that is produced is here the architectural dispositive, the great sheets of glass, and the grand view across the transept in Hyde Park that formed the Crystal Palace Exhi- bition, as well as the many other elements of its branding and self-presentation (e.g. “The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations…”). Morton points out that this concept of world is extremely fragile, that one only need to begin to scratch at any of its surfaces in order to reveal the extent to which it is a meticulously manufactured and manicured matter. Returning to the ideology of contemporary arts biennales, it is precisely such an examination of the structures of knowledge creation that they are focused on. The goal of such examinations is another kind of narrative, albeit one of a very different tenor, imbued with this will to “exorcise” certain historical traumas as mentioned earlier, in the hopes often of formulating new possible forms of existing together. As Morton writes, the goal of the “critical knowledge production” that is the focus of much contemporary curating in the visual arts is to act as a “rogue machinery … [that] has decided to crash the machine, in the name of a social and cognitive configuration to come” (2013, 20). Contained in this position is a re-affirmation of the fundamental functioning of a rationalist-enlightenment system, however with the caveat that there are elements of this system that must be reformed in order to be able to address the problems and challenges that both humans and the earth face in the 21st century, be they issues of social justice, or earth-level catastrophes such as global-warming. Inasmuch as such a focus on criticality of the structures of knowledge production constitutes a clear area of distinction between contemporary arts biennales and performing arts festivals, it is precisely this facet of curating that is most salient to the performing arts. The next section will therefore explore some key moments in the development of this discourse in contemporary art in order to begin to establish the specific ways in which its lessons can be applied to the particular case of both music and the performing arts. 2 Curating 61

2.3 Curating Biennales

This section will examine the emergence of the professional profile of the biennale curator as they exist today. The goal will be to highlight several seminal moments in its development, in order to show the challenges and debates that define it. The focus in this section is on Documenta in Kassel, because it has been a site for many important developments in biennale curating, but also because it illustrates how many different factors—geopolitics, art history, global vs local—are brought together and negotiated through curatorial practice. The section will focus on three particularly important editions of documenta, each significant for its own reasons. The first section will examine the inaugural Documenta in 1955, and thedebates around Harald Szeemann’s Documenta in 1972, and the second section will examine Enwezor’s Documenta 11 in 2002. Each will focus on different parts of what make up biennale curatorship, though of course it being the same festival, there are certain threads that flow through all of the editions.

2.3.1 DocumentaV

Documenta was originally established in 1955 by professor and exhibition-designer Arnold Bode. The exhibition was put on with the intention of repudiating the Nazi- era branding of modernism as degenerate art (Entartete Kunst), and reintegrating Germany with avant-garde artistic movements, in an attempt to modernize and move forward after the trauma of war. Bode’s inspiration came from his visit to the Venice Biennale of 1954, demonstrating the importance of Venice as a site for the dissemination of the biennale model (Wallace 2011, 5). (documenta n.d.-a) Its first edition took place in the Fridericianum, still in ruins after the Allied bombing campaigns of WWII. It is significantly is the oldest public museum in Europe, having been built in 1779 on the Enlightenment principals of making the art collection of the state visible to the public. This effort by the state to promote the consumption of culture by the masses as a form of education is an early instance of the emerging intellectual culture of the 19th century, which has already been addressed in examining the universal expositions. (Wallace 2011) Documenta II took place four years later in 1959, but as of Documenta V moved to a 5-year rhythm which it has kept up since. The exhibition has also expanded into a host of additional sites, including ones outside of Germany, which will be addressed later. The first exhibition having lasted around 2 months, by Documenta 3 it had become deemed by Bode the “Museum of 100 Days,” a length that it has mostly kept since then (documenta n.d.-b). Documenta V, perhaps its most famous edition, took place in 1972 under the direction of Swiss curator Harald Szeemann. Before this though, it is important to 62 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

take a brief detour and examine the growth of Szeemann’s curatorial practice also before that landmark event. By the time Szeemann had received the commission for Documenta 5, he had made a name for himself already as an important and influential curator in the art world. Before documenta, he became famous for “When Attitudes become Form” (1969) at the Kunsthalle Bern. The show highlighted artists working in then-emerging genres that rejected the creation of the art object in favour of situations and processes. The exhibition also featured artists whose work could not be “displayed” in the museum in the traditional sense, such as conceptual art and land art, about which can only be informed or referenced through documentation (Szeemann 1981, 47). The show was not well received by the Swiss public; the resulting outcryled eventually to Szeemann’s firing. Szeemann, newly-unemployed, would subsequently go on to found his now- famous Agentur für Geistige Gastarbeit, his own for-hire independent curatorial organization. This “agency,” consisting only Szeemann himself as a private person, was an early instance of a curator breaking away from a large institution and offering their freelance services for hire on a project-by-project basis to arts institutions. Szeemann’s agency is usually interpreted as a symptom of the fact that the curator’s role had, by the 1960s, largely shifted away from the care of collections and towards the staging of exhibitions, a change whose implications would prove significant in the further development of the term until the present. Curating, as one is endlessly reminded, comes etymologically from cura, meaning to take care of something. The term curating stems from the curator’s former professional role taking care of the museum’s collections, meaning the storage and preservation of works, but also their hanging and transportation. As many contemporary works became more immaterial, referential (e.g. documentation of land art or conceptual art, as with the exhibition in Bern), or performative, the role of the curator shifted to this second role of exhibition design. Szeemann’s agency reflects this, no longer tied down to museums and their collections, as an independent curator he can focus on the design of exhibition experiences, working in many different kinds of spaces and with a large range of artists. Curating becomes then a situated practice, it becomes performative, focused on the event of the concentration and coming together of works and performances for a short time for an exhibition. This stands in contrast to the museum logic of collecting, preserving, acting as a mausoleum. Artistic and curatorial practice were developing together, away from an emphasis on the narrative of art history, and towards emphasizing art as an event that either happened in the exhibition in the moment of experiencing it, or in the moment of their performance (usually then exhibited as traces, such as video or documentation). Harald Szeemann’s Documenta V in 1972 is regarded as an example of curatorial authorship revolving around the singular subjective authorship of the mystified 2 Curating 63 curator/genius. Szeemann was given the title of “General Secretary,” and made it known that his final authority over the exhibition would not easily be able tobe questioned by the 5–7 person working group who helped realize the exhibition. Documenta V was significant in that it was the first Documenta that did nottake place under the leadership of Bode, instead being run by Szeemann, with Bode serving only in an advisory role. Szeemann’s Documenta 5 was given the name “Questioning Reality–Pictorial Worlds Today.” The exhibition that until then had understood itself as an “100 days’ exhibition,” was profiled by Szeemann as a “100- day event,” showing the influence that Fluxus and happenings, as well as the student protests of 1968 some years earlier, had had on Szeemann. The exhibition was thematic and subjective in its choice of artists and works, in contrast to Bode’s attempt at creating a survey of contemporary art trends at the time. Szeemann’s curatorial concept was to show a juxtaposition of both so-called artistic and non-artistic images with the intention of having viewers decide for themselves just how art should be defined, and to create what he called new forms of seeing (Szeemann 1981, 74). To achieve this, the exhibition was divided into three main sections, “Individual Mythologies,” a presentation of 70 artists mainly in the areas of performance, installation, and process-based art. “Parallel visual worlds,” made up mostly of design, and things not normally considered as art (poster design, propaganda, etc.), and lastly “Artists’ Museums,” where artists curated their own exhibitions. These included Claus Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum, Duchamp’s La Boîte en Valise (1941), and Broodthaers Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Sec- tion d’Art Moderne, among other works (Szeemann 1972, 9). It was also the first time that installations made up a large amount of theworks on display, meaning that many rooms were filled and conceived of entirely byone artist. It should be pointed out that as here the experientiality and festivity of the experience of the work of art is being discussed, that the installation is part of a logical continuation of this trend within the visual arts: As Fried, and later O’Do- herty, have argued, the installation can be seen as the transformation of the entire room into the work of art. These kinds of works, which melt out of their frames and share the space with the viewer mean that the experience becomes one “of an object in a situation—one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder” (Fried [1967] 1998, 153; see also O’Doherty [1976] 1999, 29). They become theatrical, experi- ential, and begins to approach the performativity of theatre and music, interesting also for our purposes later. Szeemann intended for Documenta 5 to be a “schooling of the eye” (Sehschule). As has been argued to be the case among the universal expositions and their in- culcation of a specific scopic regime, a schooling of the eye is a common refrain among arts festivals as well. Unique to Szeemann’s approach was that it was informed and influenced by the 1968 revolution, and as a result it did not intend to prescribe new values, but rather to enrich and foster the experience of seeing in 64 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

itself, in a kind of rekindling of the Enlightenment spirit. Szeemann would then in theory function as a kind of “ignorant schoolmaster” in the Rancièrian sense of providing the audience with a will and motivation to learn, through the staging of objects on display, but not an intellect to be learnt, which elsewhere has been called a specific political ideology or modernist narrative. He let rather artists andnon- art objects to provide this intellect, and ultimately leaving it up to the audience themselves, at least in theory. (Rancière 1991, 14) Szeemann’s approach was intended to be an attack on prescribed readings and didacticism in the museum. His argument was that once we have cleaned it of being a mausoleum—a place of worship of the arts—the museum can once again be rendered useful to contemporary artists. During this time, much artistic practice was performative, happening in the street, and in spaces not traditionally associated with art: Much artistic production post-1968 sought to reject the bourgeois institutions of artistic practice associated with the hidden dissemination of their hegemonic ideologies. Szeemann however made a point of utilizing the Neue Gal- lerie and the Fridericianum, the two old museums in Kassel. He tried to bring art back into the museum by ridding the museum of its former position of status, and attempting to align it with this anti-bourgeois, emancipatory spirit. With Documenta 5, Szeemann’s interest was in moving away from grand exhibitions extoling the singular and authoritative course of art history, once again attempting to disavow a core function of the museum institution. He wanted instead to move towards a much broader, more subjective understanding of art history that was made up of “individual mythologies” that gave the audience their own authority to decide how to construct their own proper art historical narratives. He understood his role as differentiating the audiences’ gaze, rather than creating sim- ple and dogmatic yes or no structures of acceptance or denial to the status of art (Szeemann 1972, 74–75). This emphasis on a lack of art historical theme counterintuitively made thisthe first Documenta to have a specific programmatic focus set by its curator, “Ques- tioning Reality” (Richter 2008, 110). This is an important distinction that must be made: Bode’s motivation for presenting modernist and abstract art in West Ger- many was the reinstating of an oppressed history, though one that was perhaps less inevitable than large-scale post-war exhibitions made it seem. Bode, in contrast to Szeemann, worked more as an instrument of a grand, modern narrative of inevitable aesthetic progress, a change in content but not underlying approach from Nazi art policy. Szeemann, in his post-modern, post-1968 style, rejected these grand narratives in favour of smaller, individual ones, “individual mythologies” of the artists, but also, at least in theory, of visitors as well. 2 Curating 65

The Independent Curator Documenta 5 was an early example of a festival that experimented with the conditions for knowledge-creation using its organizational framework. Szeemann’s approach can be attributed to a form of curatorial practice that had been emerging, since the late 1960s, which saw curators begin to assert authorship over the exhibition as itself a kind of statement. Szeemann coined the term for this professional profile the Ausstellungsmacher, the exhibition maker. Curators such as Szeemann could be “independent” because these figures normally possessed a high enough level of influence in the art world that allowed them to break away from large institutions and work on a project basis on specific exhibitions as they came18 up. Although there exists a history of experimentation with the exhibition setting by curators and artists alike well before the focus here on the 1960s, what is significant is that this period marked an increase in the treatment of the exhibition as its own particular medium, as well as in the number of large international group exhibitions organized by these independent curators.19 Group exhibitions allowed for comparisons and contrasts between works from various artists and styles, orchestrated by the curator through their modelling of the exhibition experience (O’Neil 2012, 16). Exhibitions became thematic rather than linear or retrospective. Artists were often also asked to make works uniquely for specific shows, creating situations where curators and artists would have to collaborate and establish some kind of working relationship specific to the exhibition being put on. Thiswas a particular relationship to many of the early independent curators, as their curatorial practices were often inextricably linked to the forms of artistic practice of the artists that they represented. The relationships between independent curators like Szeemann and artists such as Buren or Beuys was often symbiotic; e.g. artists often using a curator’s stiff frame and concept as a springboard and set of enabling constraints. The role of the independent curator as the author of the exhibition becomes more complex when we continue to further examine the similarities between their practices and the many forms of experimental art, installation art, and conceptual art that had been emerging since the 1940s. Because artists’ works increasingly depended on specific sites of production and display, it was in their interest to have as much control over these as possible. The issue was that these mediating factors such as hanging plans or choiceofsite were the traditional domain of institutions or curators. Added to this was, as seen with Szeemann, that curators’ roles were shifting to assume authorship over the

18 Other significant early independent curators were Konrad Fischer, Walter Hopps, and Seth Siegelaub, to name just a few. 19 Afurtherexplorationofexperimentalformsofdisplaygoesbeyondthescopeofthisvolume. See however O’Neil 2012, 9–13. 66 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

exhibition and its display, we can begin to see a battle for control over the exhibition and its interpretation emerge. This new overlap in the responsibilities of artists and curators set up asitua- tion of tension and negotiation between them. Some of the controversies around Documenta 5 are good examples of this, and will be explored below. This situation of the “battle” for the exhibition between the artist and the curator was far from unproductive. On the contrary, it would prove to be a crisis of definition and sharp- ening of profiles that was highly productive and interesting for the visual arts.The exhibition became the creative nexus of the art world, the standard unit of knowledge production, created as intense moments of negotiation between curators and artists, and of course a host of other stakeholders. Having now surveyed some of the key aspects of Szeemann’s work, it is now possible to examine the relationship between Szeemann’s persona, his curatorial approach, and the criticism of the exhibition by artists, which will in turn allow for a survey of some of the key debates that underpin the field of curating.

Criticism by Documenta Artists Two significant critiques by Documenta 5 artists will be focused on here, Daniel Buren and Marcel Broodthaers. Buren used his space in the exhibition’s catalogue to write a text entitled “Ausstellung einer Ausstellung,” or exhibition of an exhibition. Buren argued that there was a tendency in exhibitions of the day to themselves be portrayed as works of art, rather than allowing works of art to speak on their own. In his analogy, artists’ works function only as “pigments” for the larger “painting” created by the curator—Szeemann. Works exist in a degraded position, as the curator selects them according to their suitability for the larger exhibition work and its central thesis (Buren 1972, 29). Buren’s argument is that works are both acknowledged as art through their selection and inclusion in the exhibition, but simultaneously destroyed through their valorization solely within the curatorial thesis or narrative, which illuminates only a specific reading of the work. Though part of Szeemann’s concept was ostensibly the emancipation of the exhibition-goer, encouraging them to make their own decisions as to the definition of art, his ascription of artists’ positions into the three main categories of his exhibition were for Buren merely a replacement of one form of control over his works to another. Szeemann’s position against the traditional museum’s authority over the definition of artistic work can be read as a post-modernist displacement of the role of the museum, and a new form of the same appropriation of the autonomy of the artwork that the museum itself practiced. The modern museum of fine art at thetime typically hung its collections chronologically, implying in this pattern a progres- 2 Curating 67 sion of the universalist narrative of art history. This narrative was rejected by post- modernism, and the authority of the museum in defining art history was taken away by the 1968 generation’s rejection of forms of state authority. The exhibition of works by the independent curator acknowledges the failure of the modernist project in the post-modern sense, but, as per Buren’s argument, replaces a universalist narrative with a subjective one of the curator’s own telling, their “individual mythology.” Thinking again about the system of display of the universal expositions and the beginning of the modernist gallery, the same way of functioning remains. Just like in the universal exposition, artworks are subjected to a dual operation of being taken out of their original contexts and inserted into a new one, making them illustrations of a larger narrative. The shift from a modernist to post-modernist paradigm in the use of the museum then still meant artworks were subservient to the conditions of their display (Groys 2008b, 50–51). Interestingly though, when power then becomes manifest in an “authorizing” subject, the independent curator Szeemann, the criticism of this system by artists seems to be more successful, or are more apparent in the exhibition’s presentation. Artists were given a clear sparring partner, and as is clear with Documenta 5, they fought back. Buren’s position of resistance against the domination of Szeemann’s approach extended also to his works in the exhibition. He covered seven walls in six sections of Documenta with wallpaper consisting of stripes of two shades of white. Some surrounded works, others were used as normal exhibition walls with works placed on top of them. Buren’s interventions were an invitation to viewers to become aware of the walls in the exhibition space: a mild disruption was introduced into the anonymity of the white cube. Buren’s intent was to show that

beitthestretcher,thevenue,orthesocialcontext—theframeinwhichanartwork is presented is always involved in the production of meaning and itself undergoes changesinfunctiondependingonthedefinitionofartbroughttobearinanygiven case. (von Bismarck 2017)

Whether into a universal modernist narrative, or a subjective post-modern position of Szeemann attempting to integrate artists’ works into his own meta-artwork, Buren’s stripes were an intervention against the subjugation of art to the interests of the exhibition. Buren was not arguing for the destruction of this institution, but rather for its functioning in a way that left artists control over the contextualization of their own works. A second position within Szeemann’s Documenta was the final two installments of Marcel Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne, the Departement des Aigles, Section Pub- licité and Section d’Art Moderne (1972). It gives a slightly different perspective on this same issue of the relationship between curator and artist. It differs however from the critique by Buren in its form; resistance is practiced through the consummate 68 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

construction of an exhibition within an exhibition, a parody of Szeemann’s concept. The Departement des Aigles, Section Publicité consisted of an exhibition showing the use of the eagle in advertising. Significantly, this artist-as-curator’s exhibition in the exhibition was reminiscent of 19th century exhibitions and ethnological display cabinets. This meant creating a rigorous reference system consisting ofan alphabetical annotated index, and labels placed next to each eagle object inscribed with a reference number and the phrase “This is not a work of art” (Snauwaert [1972] 2017, 130). The throwback to the 19th century was a thematization of the same ambigu- ous issues that have been presented in the section on universal expositions. This is namely a highlighting of the exhibition display as a rationalizing force, able to produce its own narrative out of the de- and re-contextualized exhibited cultural artefacts. Broodthaers in reconstructing this system was enacting an “empirical verification” of its workings (Snauwaert [1972] 2017, 131). By imitating as anartist the rituals and practices of the rationalist-modernist museum, he sought to question its power and authority over the works themselves (ibid.). In doing so in his capacity as artist, Broodthaers sought to reclaim territory in the struggle for authority over meaning to artists and their works themselves, rather than the curator. Second, in the Section d’Art Moderne, a plaque on the floor was inscribed with the phrase “Private Property” in three languages. Halfway through the exhibition, Broodthaers changed the plaque to a longer inscription whose final phrase read “faire informer pouvoir” (do, inform power) (Bishop 2007, 17). On this occasion, he gave insight into his reasoning for both the first inscription and the change, which shows us how Broodthaers understood the criticality of this exhibition microcosm: He claims that the inscription “private property” was to emphasize his artistic power replacing that of the organizer Szeemann within his small corner of the larger exhibition, something which he felt he did not achieve with his exhibition-within-an-exhibition. This caused him to changed it to the second inscription, meant to “subvert the organizational scheme of the exhibition” (ibid.). What is clear here is the struggle for the artistic work to be able to define its own manner of contextualization, rather than being de- and re-contextualized to suit the “meta-painting” of the curator—here Szeemann, but previously also the modernist museum that functioned in the same way. The importance in separating out the role of the artist from that of the curator is in order to highlight the autonomy of Broodthaers’ position within Documenta 5. There must be space for the artist to be able to subvert the exhibition with itsinter- est in subsuming the artistic position within a preconceived framework. Without this, artists run the danger of falling back into the problematic situation of the exhibition practices of the 19th century, namely the loss of the artists’ authorial 2 Curating 69 autonomy, they exist then only through their representation by a curator to their audience. His observation halfway through Documenta 5 that his exhibition was failing to establish such an autonomous space for itself, prompting the changing of the inscription plaque, speaks to this as well. Though ostensibly Documenta 5 was focused on empowering artists, Szeemann was skewing towards attempting to com- pose his own “meta”-artistic position out of artists’ works: the resistance to this act revealed that the role of curator could not be viewed as analogous to the status of the commissioned artists. The system that had worked more or less for exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bern did not scale to the size of documenta. Curators during this time were undergoing transformations in their professional profile as a result of the rapid expansion of the art world. Along withtheir function as auteur of the exhibition, they were taking on also an expanded administrative role, representing artists and their wishes, but also the market, and the financial/logistical considerations of large-scale exhibitions (Bishop 2007, 18). Cu- rators thus differed from artists in that they are reliant on hegemonic powers and their interest in narrative-making. As will be shown with later editions of documenta, part of the curatorial task becomes creatively working-with these constellations of powers.

Harald Szeemann the Figure The opening photo series of Szeemann’s book Museum of Obsessions from 1981 shows Szeemann at document 5 lounging on a throne, surrounded by a throng of artists. Dorothee Richter shows in her art-historical analysis of these photos that this iconic image has a long history meant to evoke the relation between Christ as god in human form in the middle of the image, and the those who surround him in a clear hierarchy of relations (Richter 2008, 110–111). The curator positions himself as a god, at least in his own domain of the exhibition, a genius, surrounded by his disciples. Documenta 5 was a comprehensive attempt by Szeemann to subsume a multitude of artistic works under one umbrella, thus positioning his practice in a way analogous to his self-portrayal in photos (Richter 2008, 114–115). Though it has been discussed that Szeemann’s approach could be understood in terms of a shift from modern to post-modern knowledge-production, his self- understanding as singular auteur of the exhibition brings up a different problem. Szeemann was not just acting as the “will” of the exhibition, occupying himself with the logistical concerns while letting artists express themselves and their “intellect” as they wished (to invoke again Rancière’s concept of the ignorant schoolmaster), he was becoming as von Bismarck describes it a “first among equals,” rather than a co-collaborator with the artists (von Bismarck 2017). The criticism of Szeemann becomes that he used this plaidoyer for freedom and emancipation as a way of jockey- 70 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

Image 2: Photograph of Harald Szeemann with artists on the last day of Documenta 5, Oct. 8, 1972. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2011.M.30).

ing for influence and gaining power for himself. As Richter’s analysis of Szeemann and his photos with Documenta artists concludes, what is visible is how Szeemann used the iconography of a seemingly anarchistic and emancipated concept of artistic production to establish himself at the top of a hierarchical system of meaning- production (Richter 2008, 121).20 This criticism of Szeemann and his character points to a further important point in the development of curatorial practice. It matters a great deal not just what the curatorial concept is on paper or what artists are presented, but also how

20 Richter’s analysis contrasts Szeemann with the quasi-curatorial work of Maciunas and the Fluxus group. Maciunas, despite half-hearted attempts at becoming the central node in the Fluxus network, was rather more a facilitator. Richter argues, through the analysis of archival photos, that any such self-definition of Maciunas as in the centre of the network is non-exis- tent;ratherwhatisseenaretheanarchisticandnon-hierarchicalmomentsthatwereafoilto Szeemann’s centrality at Documenta (2008, 115–121). This can be connected to the case study analysis of Berno Odo Polzer’s leadership of Maerzmusik, which is concluded to exhibit a similar contradiction in values, see the conclusion of that chapter in section 5.9. 2 Curating 71 the internal working conditions of the curatorial practice exist in relationship to the stated curatorial strategy. Curating is an act of mediation between all manner of stakeholders that come together to produce the event of exhibition, the stated intention of the curatorial strategy is only one small part of this larger network; the direct actions and choices of the curator, whether intentional or not, are just as important as any discrete statements they should make. Szeemann’s practice shows that curating cannot be simply about hanging and conceiving the exhibition itself, but rather must encompass also the working relationships with these stakeholders, navigating these various social contexts successfully. His earlier projects, such as at the Kunsthalle Bern, were also similar kinds of battles for authorship over the exhibition, battles that Szeemann enjoyed having, and which defined his career. What seems to be the case though with Documenta is that these working relationships began to sour in the leadup to the exhibition itself, with artists feeling that they were losing the ability to negotiate with the curator. When we look at these criticisms by Buren, Broodthaers, or Robert Morris (whose equally-important criticism of Documenta 5 will not be examined here), the common thread seems to be a sentiment of a loss of control over the struggle.21 No longer was a shared symbolic space for intense debate over the status of the exhibition possible, it was replaced by Szeemann’s singular vision: the curator became too influenced by his own need for self-promotion. This within a changing arts institutional landscape that increasingly centred on the figure of the curator as the hypervisible nexus of power in the art world. Despite these fundamental and cutting criticisms of Szeemann, scholars Mar- tini and Martini argue that despite his authoritarian structure marking the beginning of a period of hyper-visibility for the solitary curator-figure running through the 1970s and 1980s, his Documenta 5 working method, working together with a curatorial team, would anticipate the trend towards the schema of central curator and network of collaborators that would become common among later biennales (2010, 265). Remaining within the specific framework of documenta, the network model with a number of collaborators working together with the artistic director would take another generation to establish itself structurally in the institution of documenta. It was perhaps only rhetorically the case with Jan Hoet’s Documenta 9 in 1992 that such a system was established, but a collective, network model was strongly reflected in the structural set-up of Documenta exhibitions beginning with Catherine David’s Documenta 10 (1997) and Enwezor’s Documenta 11 (2002) (Mar- tini and Martini 2010, 268).

21 On Robert Morris’ letter of withdrawal from Documenta 5, see Bishop 2007, 14–15. 72 Curating Contemporary Music Festivals

Szeemann’s first great experiment with the Documenta format thus seemed to fall back into the same kinds of criticisms of an overdetermination of artistic works by its framing and contextualization by the festival that have been seen before. Significantly though, the event should not be solely seen in this light. The exhibition was also an early attempt at experimentation with the structures of knowledge- creation of a large-scale arts festival, and were part of an era that would mark a turning point in approaches to arts festival leadership in this regard. The struggles with artists like Buren and Broodthaers are also very significant developments, as they represent a growing trend in visual art towards artists using contextualization of works as part of their expressive medium, and taking a position towards the curator’s concept for the exhibition explicitly in their works and writings. Buren’s striped walls encouraged visitors to acknowledge the specificity of site, working against the manufactured illusion of the white cube. Broodthaers’ museum-in-a-museum allowed him to call into question the infrastructure that manufactures perception of works on display. More important than tying these various struggles into a neat package, what the case of Documenta 5 shows is the transformation of the exhibition by the mid- century into a contested site of various mediations on multiple levels by artists and curators alike. It also shows that mediation of the artistic work is not the sole responsibility of the exhibition curator, but is rather something much less central- ized, an action that can be done by curators and artists alike.

2.3.2 Documenta11

Documenta 11 was curated by artistic director Okwui Enwezor, and took place in 2002. This section will explore the particular and landmark ways in which theex- hibition succeeded in addressing the issue of representation of artistic production from non-Western regions and artists. This was achieved through a particularly innovative structural setup of the exhibition, dividing it into a series of five platforms, the last of which was the exhibition in Kassel. Also notable was Enwezor’s insistence on working as a “manager” rather than curator-as-author of documenta, allowing a diversity of knowledges to flow into the creation of the event.

Magiciens de la Terre Before exploring Documenta 11 itself, an important precursor in the treatment of non-Western contemporary art production in the West must be examined, as its approach (and mistakes) would come to inform the structures of Documenta 11. The exhibition in question is “Magiciens de la Terre,” curated by Marc Francis and Jean- Hubert Martin in 1989, which itself was inspired by “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” at the MoMA NYC in1984–5.